


It Comes and Goes in Waves/It Always Does

by roaroftheninth



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, M/M, Post-War, Soldiers, War, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-21
Updated: 2017-03-10
Packaged: 2018-09-25 23:55:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 15
Words: 50,748
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9852662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roaroftheninth/pseuds/roaroftheninth
Summary: “He says that he’s grateful for that ending, because he always wanted to imagine it like that and you were always a better storyteller than he was. But that’s not the ending that should be published, because it’s not the truth.”Summary: It is 1953; Louis makes that nine years since they won the war (eight if you count the Americans, which he never does). His first novel, a best-seller set during wartime, is due for a sequel - but Louis doesn't want to face the ending.





	1. The Road Divides Ahead

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Waves by Dean Lewis.

Harry figures he’s read around 5,460 books.

 

He gets through maybe five in a week, which is two hundred and sixty books a year, and at twenty-five he’s probably been reading for about twenty-one years. Some weeks he reads less than five if he’s really swamped at work, but then again, some weeks he reads significantly more than five. (He got through twelve when he went on holiday to the coast last year.)

 

Still, though, part of that is his job – he’s a literary agent, the kind who operates his own small literary agency which is a satellite to a bigger publishing house in London, but flexible to the point where sometimes he feels like he’s still freelancing – and he doesn’t necessarily _like_ everything that he reads, although he nearly always finishes a book if he starts it. He reads so much that everything starts to muddle together after a while, unless there’s something truly noteworthy or spectacular about a work.

 

When something stands out like that, when he’s still thinking about it days or weeks later, carrying it around with him to the supermarket and the office and at night when he’s drifting off to sleep, that’s how he knows that he’s going to represent the author who wrote it. Harry gets a lot of submissions – not as many as, say, a big-ticket, well-known firm with famous clients, but enough to keep him busy – and he goes through every single one, leaving hand-written notes in the margins before he mails the submissions back.

 

That’s unusual for an agent, since usually they send back a form rejection letter. But Harry always believes that people deserve to have their hard work acknowledged, and every now and again an author will take his notes into consideration, use them to improve their work, and re-submit something Harry can actually work with.

 

Harry spends a lot of time on authors who will probably never actually make him any money, but he can afford to do that because he literally makes enough money to live off of from _one_ project. There’s _one_ author he’s represented whose debut novel took the bestseller lists by storm, completely unexpectedly, and that _one_ book is Harry’s calling card, the reason why the big publishing houses take him seriously.

 

It’s that one book that has him driving twenty minutes out of town on a blustery Tuesday morning, wearing a long wool coat against the foulness of the weather and tapping his fingers distractedly against the steering wheel to the Andrews Sisters on the radio. Harry likes to think, with a touch of wryness, that he’s making the drive because he’s always been a personal-touch type of agent, but to be honest, it’s largely because Louis Tomlinson doesn’t answer his phone.

 

He _has_ a phone; Harry watched it being installed, several years ago, when Louis’ novel first became the toast of the publishing world. Harry had clapped Louis on the back and said he’d be in touch soon to discuss the sequel Louis had promised everyone when he’d signed the contract to get his first book published.

 

Harry had attempted to get in touch. Louis had ignored him.

 

As he rolls down the country lane towards the old farmhouse that Louis has lived in since Harry met him (and probably long before), Harry wonders at the character of someone who becomes famous overnight and promptly retreats from it like Louis has, ignoring the slew of movie producers, editors, journalists, and the curious public who have literally and figuratively trooped past his door. He’s never sure how to reconcile Louis with the characters he writes about; the former is sarcastic and difficult to get along with, while the latter are bright and engaging, so _human_ in a way that’s drawn in readers the world over.

 

It doesn’t make any sense. But then again, Harry doesn’t really need it to. He just needs Louis to churn out an award-winning sequel and then he’ll be on his way.

 

Except that proves to be easier said than done, as Harry shivers on the front steps under the onslaught from the rain and waits – very patiently – for someone to open the door.

 

He has to knock four times before he hears a voice from the overhead second-storey window.

 

“You’re making an awful lot of noise.”

 

“Yes,” Harry agrees pleasantly. “It’s called knocking. It means I’d like to come in.”

 

Louis leans out and studies him. His fringe is already soaked from the rain. “Are you here to ask me to write my sequel?”

 

Harry wipes water away, from where it’s attempting to drip rather unflatteringly off his chin. “Maybe a bit?”

 

Louis scowls. “What’s the date today?”

 

“Er.” Harry calculates back. He went to a reception thing on the twentieth. That was Saturday. “The twenty-third of March, nineteen fifty-three.”

 

“I make that nine years since we won the war; eight if we’re counting the Americans, which I never do. I’m sure everyone’s as sick of reading about all of that as I am of writing about it,” Louis says with an air of finality, and goes to shut the window.

 

“Louis,” Harry says patiently. “Could you – please? Let me in? Only my hat’s getting ruined.”

 

“I’m not sure what the good of a hat is,” Louis says sourly, “if it’s not there to keep water off your head.”

 

He slams the window shut.

 

Nearly three minutes later, when Harry’s on the verge of giving up and coming back on a day when the wind doesn’t try to cut clean through his bones, the front door opens.

 

“Come on, get in, you’re letting the heat out,” Louis says crossly. He’s wearing slippers and an untied cravat.

 

“Thank you,” Harry says gratefully, shaking excess water off his jacket on the doormat. Louis eyes that with distaste but doesn’t say anything, folding his arms over his chest. His thick sweater, contrary to what you’d expect, makes him look smaller and thinner than he is.

 

“D’you think I could hang up my jacket?” Harry asks brightly, once he removes it and Louis makes no move to take it.

 

Louis sort of shrugs at him and turns away, walking very determinedly away down the passage. After a beat, Harry follows.

 

It turns out that Louis isn’t being entirely anti-social, as he takes Harry to a little study with a cheery fire blazing in the hearth and mutely indicates that Harry should hang up his jacket nearby.

 

“Thanks,” Harry says, rubbing his hands together in front of the flames. “It’s rubbish outside; I was nearly carried away by the wind.”

 

“What’s that car you drive?” Louis asks, still with his arms folded.

 

“A Mercedes 180,” Harry says, and he smiles, because he can’t help himself. It’s a nice car. “Just out this year.”

 

Louis nods along. Harry thinks he approves, but typically Louis is very, very clear about what he likes and doesn’t like so he’s not sure.

 

“Would you like some tea?” Louis asks.

 

“Oh, yes, please,” Harry says. “I take a bit of honey.”

 

Louis makes a face. “I like my tea to taste like tea and I don’t entertain.”

 

Harry cocks his head. “What does that mean?”

 

Louis turns on his heel. As he’s leaving the room, he replies, “It means I don’t have any honey.”

 

Harry’s not sure what to say to that, so he doesn’t say anything. With Louis gone, the room feels less tense, somehow, and Harry tucks his hands into his pockets and starts to look around. There’s a collection of very old books on the shelf behind the desk, with spines cracked or missing and the lettering faded. The thick curtains jerked over the window to block out the blustery day outside are old and dusty, and Harry realizes after a moment that they haven’t been used to block out today, specifically; it looks like they were dragged across the window a long time ago and never opened afterward.

 

For some reason, it makes Harry a little sad to imagine Louis shut up in this dark room alone, a roaring fire going in the hearth even on the sunniest of summer days.

 

There are two photographs on the mantle above the fireplace, and Harry examines the posed one first, a gaggle of little girls gathered around a young Louis and a man and a woman who might be his parents. Louis looks uncomfortable in it, uneasy in the stiff, formal clothing he’s wearing, and Harry wonders if Louis’ always been the way he is now; caustic, brittle, and ill at ease around most people.

 

That notion is erased when Harry turns to look at the second picture. This one is slightly blurry, and Harry can tell from the uniforms the three lads are wearing and Louis’ approximate age that it was taken during the war. One of the soldiers in the photo has his head thrown back, laughing, and the second soldier is grinning ear to ear, tongue tucked behind his teeth, forehead pressed down against the first soldier’s neck. It’s Louis, though, that draws Harry’s attention; he’s got his arm around the two lads, beaming, eyes bright and mischievous, and Harry feels a little thrown, like he’s invading a private moment of happiness of which he was never meant to be a part.

 

Harry carefully takes the frame off the mantle and tugs the photograph out from under the glass, turning it over to read the scrawled words on the back.

 

_France. 1941._

 

“I don’t reckon you were old enough to see any fighting,” Louis says, and Harry startles, nearly dropping the photograph. Hastily, he tucks it back inside the frame and replaces it on the mantle.

 

“No,” Harry agrees, turning to face him. Louis is carrying two cups of tea, and he looks – not upset with Harry, or anything, but odd. Harry can’t put his finger on it. “I was sixteen when the war ended.”

 

Louis nods, but he makes no move to set the tea down or otherwise find a way to stop watching Harry with that strangely blank, unblinking stare.

 

 “Your book, though,” Harry says, clearing his throat a little. “Your book made me feel like I was there.”

 

Louis breaks his gaze then and sets Harry’s tea down on the table, cradling his own in both hands.

 

“Did it  _really_ ,” he says, a little note of mockery in his voice. He circles around the desk to hover, briefly, at the curtains, like he’s considering looking out into the rain. He doesn’t reach out and make it happen, though. “Did it make you wish you’d fixed your age on your birth certificate, joined up with your mates, shouted a rowdy  _For God, King, and Country!_  And laid it all on the line for England?”

 

Harry’s not sure he’s ever heard someone sound so sarcastic in his life.

 

“No,” he replies, surprised that his voice sounds so even despite how taken aback he is. “No. It made me wish I had friends like that.”

 

Louis makes a soft sound, almost like a huff of a laugh, except when Harry looks at his profile he’s not smiling.

 

“Haven’t you, though,” Louis asks. “Haven’t you got mates you can look around at after a pint or two and say, yeah, that one’d have my back in a tussle?”

 

Harry shrugs. “No one who’d lay down their life for me.”

 

“That’s a good thing,” Louis says, draining half of his tea despite the fact that it must still be scalding. “You don’t want to live with yourself after someone’s laid down their life for you. You don’t want to have to weigh your worth against theirs and wonder if they ought to have bothered. Drink your tea, for Christ’s sake, I didn’t make it so you could let it get cold.”

 

Harry does pick up his tea, slightly chastened, and sips at it.

 

It’s strong; not his favourite.

 

“How was France, though?” Harry asks.

 

“Muddy and full of Germans,” Louis replies, finishing the rest of his tea and setting the cup down on the desk. “As you’ve come for the sequel, I should give you full disclosure now and make you aware that I haven’t even begun writing it. Not one word.”

 

Harry gawps at him. “You told me six months ago that you’d started, over the phone.”

 

“I lied,” Louis replies pleasantly.

 

“But  _why?_ ” Harry asks.

 

“Why did I lie or why have I not written a single word?” Louis asks, being deliberately obtuse as far as Harry can tell.

 

“The whole world is waiting on that sequel,” Harry tells him, indignant. “ _I’m_  waiting on that sequel.”

 

“Then it’s a good thing I don’t exist purely for the purpose of making you money,” Louis says acidly, sitting down at his desk, and even though he’s dropped down a level, something about him in that chair with Harry on the other side of the desk, like a schoolboy about to be reprimanded by a particularly strict headmaster, makes Harry feel like the balance of power has slid away from him.

 

“It’s not about that,” Harry protests, and when Louis levels him with a look, he backtracks slightly. “Or, it’s not _entirely_  about that. I’m also waiting on the sequel because I liked the first one. A lot. And it ended on a cliffhanger and I – erm. Well, I sort of need to know what happens.”

 

“Everyone,” Louis says, with a dramatic sweep of his hand, “lives happily ever after.”

 

“I reckon someone’s got to die,” Harry says.

 

“Why’s that?” Louis asks, leaning back in his chair and folding his arms again. It seems to be a favourite pose for him.

 

Harry shrugs. “Because there’s a war on, and someone always dies.”

 

“That’s why you’re the agent and not the writer,” Louis informs him. “Because you’re a slave to clichés.”

 

“So no one dies, then?” Harry asks.

 

“I didn’t say that,” Louis replies evasively.

 

Harry sighs. “Have you even begun planning?”

 

“Oh, I know how the story ends,” Louis insists. “I’m just not keen on writing it just now.”

 

“When do you think you  _will_  be keen?” Harry asks.

 

Louis shrugs, noncommittal. “Next week? Next year? 1980?”

 

“Please don’t wait until 1980, I’ll be dead by then,” Harry pleads.

 

“You will  _not._  You’ll be in your fifties.”

 

“No,” Harry replies. “No, I will definitely be dead. If you don’t write the sequel, my career is going to end, and I’ll starve to death under a bridge.”

 

Louis fixes him with a look. “A slave to clichés. I told you.”

 

“I’m coming back tomorrow,” Harry warns.

 

“I won’t have started,” Louis says with a shrug.

 

“I’m coming anyway,” Harry says.

 

Louis glowers at him. “D’you think I’ll pen the next great British novel with you breathing down my neck?”

 

“I’m not sure,” Harry replies. “You’ve already demonstrated that you won’t write it  _without_  me breathing down your neck. Perhaps we should try something else.”

 

He doesn’t sound unkind when he says it. That’s probably why Louis just blinks at him instead of trying to fit in the last word.

 

By the time Harry’s finished his tea, the rain has let up a little. When he leaves the house, he can feel Louis’ eyes on his back all the way to the car. When he glances back at the end of the lane, though, the door to the house is closed, the drapes drawn in every window. Harry expels a breath and focuses on the road again.

 

He has no idea what makes Louis Tomlinson tick, but it’s abundantly clear that he’ll have to find out.


	2. These Mountains That You Are Carrying/You Were Only Supposed to Climb

When Harry knocks on the door the next day, overnight bag tucked under his arm, no one answers.

 

“Mr. Tomlinson!” he calls.

 

It feels like someone is listening. Harry can’t know for sure obviously, but – Louis never leaves, so he must be here.

 

Harry raps on the door again and calls out Louis’ name twice more.

 

There’s not even a glimmer of a response.

 

“I’m not going away,” Harry informs the house. “If you don’t answer the door I’ll just sleep on the porch.”

 

None of the tightly-closed drapes so much as twitch.

 

Harry sighs and sets his bag down on the wooden slats that make up the wrap-around veranda. The weather’s better today, but it’s still autumn and he’d rather not actually sleep outside, if it’s all the same to everyone. Setting off around the veranda, Harry keeps his hands tucked tightly into his pockets the first time around. The back yard is no neater than the front, overgrown with weeds that sprout rather suddenly into a thick line of trees at the edge of the property. Beyond that seems to be a wood of some kind, and Harry wants to attach the word  _forbidding_  to it, although he’s not sure why.

 

When he reaches the front again, Harry tips back his head to look up at the set of second-floor windows one more time.

 

“I’m still out here,” he calls. “’m not going away, so.”

 

Silence.

 

With a sigh, Harry travels around to the side of the veranda again, taking his bag with him this time. He had noticed that there were two open windows on the first floor the first time around, and if he has to take advantage, well, he will. Nudging the first one open a bit further, Harry drops his bag inside the – living room? Possibly? – and clambers over the sill himself.

 

It’s a bit high off the ground, and Harry has to stand up on his tip-toes to even get his leg over. Once he does, he gives a nasty wobble and grabs at the window frame for support. Unfortunately, by the time he grabs it, there’s the slightly chilly barrel of a rifle pressed against his temple.

 

“Usually when a bloke doesn’t answer the door,” Louis says, “he means fuck off.”

 

“Can I come in?” Harry asks. “I’m halfway.”

 

“No,” Louis replies. “You can’t.”

 

“Why d’you have a gun?” Harry asks, patently aware of how ridiculous it is to be sitting on a window sill with one leg in someone’s living room and the other on their porch.

 

“Because I don’t like people trying to sneak into my house,” Louis says pointedly. “And because I don’t trust the Germans.”

 

“Really?” Harry asks.

 

Louis takes the gun away from Harry’s head, aiming it at the floor instead. “Every time we trust the Germans, it’s  _whoops, there goes the continent._ ”

 

“Well, I reckon they’re all right now,” Harry points out.

 

“That’s what Chamberlain said,” Louis mutters darkly. He doesn’t seem intent on shooting Harry, so Harry takes the opportunity to sling his other leg into the room and stand up properly, dusting off his trousers.

 

“Would you have shot me?” Harry asks.

 

Louis flips open the cartridge. The gun’s not loaded.

 

“Oh, good,” Harry says.

 

“I could load it,” Louis warns. “Don’t test me.”

 

He stomps off, presumably to put the gun away.

 

“Can I make some tea?” Harry calls, brightly enough.

 

There’s no response.

 

Harry deliberately decides to take that as the invitation it clearly isn’t, and makes himself at home. The rest of the morning goes virtually the same way.

 

Louis has vanished somewhere – he’s not in his study, which Harry checks first, and all of the rooms on the second floor are locked – and Harry gives himself the task of cleaning out Louis’ kitchen. He thinks he might as well; Louis doesn’t look like he takes particularly good care of himself, and Harry, being a bachelor, likes to do a bit of cooking. He figures that the eventual smell of the sausages and beans he brought will draw Louis out of hiding.

 

As it turns out, he doesn’t have to wait that long.

 

Louis comes storming into the kitchen when Harry is on his knees scrubbing out the inside of the cupboard under the sink, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows and his neatly-coiffed hair askew. Louis stops short when he sees Harry, and his expression darkens further.

 

“What are you doing?”

 

“Cleaning,” Harry says helpfully. He knocks the back of his head on the inner ceiling of the cupboard when he tries to pull back enough to look at Louis.

 

“ _Informative._ ” Louis is capable of the most exquisite sarcasm Harry has ever had the privilege of hearing.

 

“You did ask,” Harry points out, rocking back on his heels. A curl falls into his eye when he looks up. “Where’ve you been?”

 

“I thought I made it clear I didn’t want you here,” Louis says, instead of answering.

 

“The kitchen was dirty,” Harry offers. “I thought I’d stay and cook something nice but I needed to do a bit of a tidy first.”

 

“What will you be cooking under my kitchen sink?” Louis asks, indicating the cupboard that Harry has just emerged from.

 

“Nothing.” Harry smiles cheerfully. “But once you get on a roll, you know.” And, because he’s a lad who perseveres: “Bit like writing.”

 

“Yes,” Louis says acidly. “Cleaning out nine years of grime is _just_ like writing a semi-autobiographical account of life during the worst war in history.”

 

“You haven’t cleaned under here in nine years?” Harry asks. Well, that clears up why he had to consider purchasing a sand-blaster.

 

“I’ve never cleaned under there,” Louis replies. “I’m being very generous about giving the previous owners the benefit of the doubt.”

 

“Hang on,” Harry says slowly. “Did you say semi-autobiographical?”

 

Louis’ eyes shutter at once. “You changed the names in the final draft,” he points out. “You know that one of the names I used was mine.”

 

“Yes, but… I didn’t – ” Harry had rather put that down to a lack of creativity.

 

Louis frowned. “You didn’t _really_ think I went through all of that hell and then didn’t use a scrap of it in my book,” he replies. “Of course it’s semi-autobiographical.”

 

“So you know how it ends,” Harry says.

 

“I do know how it ends.” Louis turns away from him. “That’s why I don’t want to end it.” His shoulders curl in on themselves a little. “Finish whatever you’re doing and get out of my house.”

 

-

 

_Louis had never liked being outdone._

_Even at school, if there had been a boy who could run faster around the track, Louis had been the type to throw out a perfectly-executed elbow at the precise moment that the teacher took his eyes off of them._

_The other boys never said anything, mainly because Louis came from the sort of neighbourhood where one either hit very hard or ran very fast, and Louis wasn’t much of a runner – hence the aforementioned necessary elbow._

_He had always thus been referred to consistently by nearby adults as ‘fiercely competitive’, which is a kind way of saying that he fought dirty and tended to be a sore loser. He had never quite grown out of that, but as an adult it had manifested somewhat differently, before the army._

_He had been quite sure, initially, that army training was going to be a bit of a laugh. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe that hard work was involved in being a soldier, but from what he had heard, the soldiering life involved much more smoking, drinking, and overall shenanigans than the brass would have you believe. He had also never been forced into doing anything that he hadn’t wanted to do, so he was quite confident that he would be able to weasel his way out of any aspect of training that he found unfavourable._

_To Louis’ surprise, he rather liked training, but not for the reasons he had anticipated. The endless drills, of course, were not particularly exciting, but when it came time to run tactical exercises, he found that they appealed to his competitive nature. There was nothing he wanted more than to trounce the other team. Very often he volunteered to be ‘the German’ when it was necessary, purely to take the mick when he cruised to victory over the less-than-pleased ‘Tommies’._

_It was the third week of training before he suffered his first defeat._

_Liam Payne was the sort of lad that Louis hated on principle; he never got any misdemeanours for his uniform being untidy, and he liked following orders almost as much as he liked being in charge, given the opportunity._

_Liam Payne always wanted to be a ‘Tommy’._

_They were down the edge of the ridge on an overcast Thursday afternoon, and Louis was confident that they had cleared enough of the terrain to make a break for it across thirty feet of open space. It was the same exercise that they had carried out that morning, except that now the teams were reversed – Louis’ was attacking, Liam Payne’s was defending._

_It was his job to create a diversion – a task that he had bequeathed upon himself, since it involved being particularly loud. Edging out from behind a tree, he shouted the first rude word he could think of and lobbed a beanbag at the stronghold._

_Liam stepped out and shot him._

_For a moment, neither of them moved._

_“For one thing,” Liam said, flipping the beanbag over with the toe of his boot, “that’s one of our grenades. You can’t pick them up and reuse them, you know.”_

_Louis rolled his eyes. “Poetic license, Liam.”_

_“No. That’s not the rule.”_

_“Fine, then.” Louis shrugged. “It doesn’t matter that you’ve shot me, because while you’ve stood here whinging about me breaking the rules, my teammates have made it to the stronghold.”_

_Liam shook his head. “It doesn’t count. The team captain has to make it.”_

_“Ah, and he has. In my dying moments after I was blown to bits by a mine, I passed the command onto Private Malik.”_

_Liam’s eyes narrowed. “If you were blown to bits by a mine, how come you’re up here throwing grenades at me and my men?”_

_Louis shrugged. “I got better.”_

_Liam’s eyebrows knit and he opened his mouth to debate this, but a voice cut across his in a burst of sound that made Louis startle slightly._

_“That’ll be ten points for Payne’s team.” Their Sergeant, a man with a face like an angry pudding, surveyed them with the air of a man who wondered if he had perhaps been doing this for too long. “Tomlinson, you’ve got a five-point penalty for resurrecting yourself.”_

_Louis’ mouth fell open. “But sir – ”_

_“Absolutely not up for discussion. You were not even discrete.”_

_Louis scowled. “Permission to be dismissed.”_

_The Sergeant nodded. “Gather your lads. You can run back to camp.”_

_On the way back, Louis looked around for an opportunity to use a perfectly-executed elbow on Liam Payne. Unfortunately, Liam was either wise to Louis’ ways or a much quicker runner. Louis told himself darkly that had he wanted to catch up, he could have._

 

-

 

Harry doesn’t get out of Louis’ house.

 

Louis really should have known better, Harry thinks, than to have piqued his curiosity like that and then asked him to leave. Now he’s made sure that leaving is the _last_ thing that Harry wants to do.

 

Louis was vague, also, about the terms of Harry leaving his house – _finish whatever you’re doing and get out_ – so Harry terms the following four hours’ worth of tile-scrubbing, food-preparing, food-eating, and food-clearing-away as _finishing whatever he’s doing._ He washes his dishes for good measure, and he even drags out the rest of Louis’ china – untouched, clearly, save for the top couple of plates and a cup that’s starting to look discoloured – and washes that too.

 

In all that time, Louis does not reappear. The house is utterly silent, and Harry wonders what Louis _does_ all day when he’s not writing until he opens the door to take the bin out and discovers the rather alarming layer of empty bottles scattered around the steps to the veranda that lead out into the overgrown back garden.

 

Louis has a taste for gin, apparently. And whiskey. And the odd bottle of what looks like the sherry that Harry’s mum keeps in the cupboard for special occasions.

 

As if on cue, a second-storey window opens over Harry’s head, and an empty bottle comes sailing past. It has the unfortunate luck of meeting the sharp edge of a stone pushing up through the cracked earth of the garden path. When it shatters, Harry almost scrambles back.

 

Up above, the window closes again.

 

When he finishes with the kitchen, Harry makes his way into the study that Louis had invited him into the day before. The two photographs on the mantle – the one of Louis’ family, and the other of him and his army friends – are still where they were the last time Harry saw them. Setting aside his bucket of soapy water and assorted cleaning paraphernalia, Harry approaches the photographs again.

 

He picks up the one of Louis and his mates. There’s Louis, smiling in a way that Harry’s never seen; empty of venom, and carefree. The two strangers – the one who laughs into the other’s neck like they’ve known each other all their lives – have started to take on a significance in Harry’s mind. He wonders if these two are the inspiration for Louis’ book, for the two closest friends of the main character. Harry renamed them in the final draft, the way he renamed nearly all of Louis’ characters, but he knows that when Louis wrote them, they were called Liam and Zayn.

 

Harry slips the photograph out of the frame again and turns it over.

 

_France. 1941._

 

If they _are_ the people upon whom Louis’ characters are based, Harry has an unsettling feeling that something had happened to them, the way war happens to people. _I do know how it ends,_ Louis had said. _That’s why I don’t want to end it._

 

Harry turns the photograph over to look at the faces again; young, jubilant and unburdened. He thinks about the pile of bottles around the steps to the veranda outside and wonders what sorrows Louis feels compelled to drink away.

 

-

 

_Zayn spooned up some oatmeal; allowed it to drip slowly back into his bowl._

_“It wasn’t appetizing before,” Louis pointed out, from across the mess table. “You’re not doing it any favours.”_

_“You know that Liam doesn’t want to be at odds with you,” Zayn said._

_Louis rolled his eyes. “Not this again.”_

_Zayn had been very persistent on the topic, and Louis had seen him and Liam after their morning drills the day before, murmuring to one another. Liam had seemed mildly upset, not that Louis cared. He was establishing, though, that Zayn was the sort who didn’t normally gravitate to people like Louis, keener to hang around on the sidelines and read the terrain – and more likely to spend time with someone like Liam._

_“He doesn’t understand how you’ve gotten it into your head that he’s a competitor you have to beat at all costs.”_

_Louis frowned. “Well, since we’re constantly pitted against one another in tactical drills, I’d say that my survival probably depends on being good enough to beat someone like him at all costs.”_

_Zayn didn’t relent; Louis hadn’t expected him to. This was how they discussed things. Louis was coming to find that it was nice to have someone who pushed back but wasn’t nasty about it. “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean that you have to take the mick out of him.”_

_“It’s so easy, though,” Louis protested, and when Zayn’s brows knitted a little, he relented. “Well, we’re not going to be mates. But I will endeavour not to take the mick. How’s that?”_

_Zayn raised an eyebrow –_ endeavour? _– and Louis aimed a little kick at him under the table. “Yeah, alright, I learned that word from you, you uppity Oxford ponce.”_

_Zayn evaded the kick easily. “At least something’s rubbing off.”_

_-_

_The thing was, Louis thought, that it was not all that easy being civil with Liam. He simply would not let Louis have the last word or take charge during military exercises, but on their downtime, he spent much of his time alone – or with Zayn. He seemed to struggle a little in social situations, and Louis, though he would not have termed himself an unkind person, couldn’t seem to resist making those situations a little bit harder for him._

_They were in their bunkhouse after dinner, with the sun still burning bright along the tops of the trees and spilling light in through the windows that were never closed. Liam was sitting on his bunk, hunched over a piece of paper that he had braced on the back of a hardcover book. Louis could not help but remark on the pace of his writing as he came in._

_“Slow-going there, eh Payno?”_

_Liam’s eyebrows furrowed, but he did not say anything, perhaps having learned by now that to do so was only to invite abuse._

_“Who are you writing to?”_

_Realizing that ignoring Louis was not prompting him to go away, Liam reluctantly looked up. “My mum.”_

_“Writing to your mum!” Louis sounded delighted, which was never a good thing. “Haven’t you got a girlfriend to write to?”_

_Liam frowned. “No. Have you?”_

_Louis’ mouth made an ‘o’. “Cheeky.”_

_“Not really.” Liam adopted the mulish expression he frequently wore when Louis was starting to back him into a corner that he wasn’t sure he would be smart enough to get out of. “I was only saying back what you said to me.”_

_Louis dropped a knee down onto Liam’s bed so that he could effectively lean over him. “What are you writing about? Can I see?”_

_Liam turned his shoulder so that it blocked Louis’ view. “No, you can’t. Piss off, Tommo.”_

_“Why? Is it embarrassing? Are you writing about me? Your best mate, Tommo?” Louis reached around him and attempted to jerk the paper out of his grasp._

_Liam responded immediately, having anticipated this, and threw an elbow into Louis’ chest. Louis had expected Liam to retaliate, of course, but he had not anticipated the aggressiveness of the response, and he knocked his elbow hard on the edge of Liam’s bunk as he fell back, utterly winded._

_The bunk house around them had gone quiet as all of the other lads turned to watch. Louis could see Zayn’s shape in his peripheral vision, propped up in bed, a book resting against his knees. He was watching, but not saying anything. Prick._

_“That was unkind, Liam,” Louis said, a little breathless as he rolled onto his side and then found his feet. “If you didn’t want me to read it, you should’ve just said so.”_

_“I did say so,” Liam said._

_“No, you didn’t. You simply went right for the elbow. It was most unkind.”_

_Liam frowned. “You shouldn’t have just grabbed for it.”_

_Louis raised an eyebrow. “Grabbed for it? What, like this?”_

_While they had been talking, Louis had repositioned himself at a better angle. This time, when he lunged forward and grabbed the paper, he was nimble enough to avoid Liam’s belated thrash at him and dance back from the bed, letter in hand._

_“Louis!” Liam was on his feet. “Give it back.”_

_“I shan’t,” Louis said. “It’s for your own good, Payno. Do you want to be the only lad here who writes to his mum every day? ‘Dear mum, I’ve had to wash my own knickers; they’re dreadful’. ‘Dear mum, I’ve had a nightmare and I’d like a hug’.”_

_A few of the other lads chuckled at that, and it made Liam grow red in the face. “Give me my letter back. Right now.”_

_“Well, I think it’d be a bit of a shame not to give it a read, don’t you?” Louis asked. He gave the paper a flourishing rattle, took a deep breath, and began: “’Dear mum, training is not so bad. Chin up.’ Wow, some of this spelling is truly appalling, Liam, and that’s coming from me. I suppose the army really will take anyone, won’t they?”_

_Liam was so angry now that Louis could almost imagine, if they were back in school, that Liam would have thrown himself at him by now, or perhaps cried out of frustration._

_This, of course, only spurred Louis forward._

_“’The other lads are mostly decent. There are one or two chaps that I especially like’. Oh, my. Which chaps, Liam? Zayn, I expect.”_

_Louis did not look over at Zayn as he said it; he could already imagine the latter’s expression._

_“’One of them is really good at the strategy things. We’re never on the same team but I – ’ hang on. Liam, is this me? Are you telling your mum we’re good mates?”_

_Louis made eye contact with Liam. Something uncomfortable wriggled inside of Louis, down under his heart. Before he had a chance to decide what to do next, a snicker from one of the other lads prompted Liam into motion._

_He threw himself at Louis, and the latter, having not braced himself in the least, went crashing hard to the floor. Liam was on him in a second, throwing wild punches that Louis could only half-manage to deflect._

_It was Cowell who waded into the jeering, shouting tangle of men and yanked Liam off of him, though the sound of his voice nearby had already been enough to prompt Liam to hesitate._

_“You’re a bully and a little shit,” Cowell told Louis, hand still fisted in the back of Liam’s shirt. “You deserve that bloody face. And you?” This was directed at Liam. “We’ll see the Captain about deciding an appropriate punishment for you.”_

_Louis allowed the other lads to help him up as Liam was led away. He waved them off, not wanting to hear what they had to say, feeling every throb of his jaw as a reminder of the thick, uncomfortable feeling in his stomach._

_When Liam returned late that night, silently preparing for bed and crawling beneath his blanket without so much as a sound, Louis was still wide awake in the dark._

_“Liam.” He said it quietly, across the empty space between their two beds._

_There was no response. Louis could see the way Liam’s shoulder was hunched up, defensive, even now._

_“Liam. One of my teeth is loose.”_

_This prompted Liam to stir very slightly. “You deserve it.”_

_“Shut up,” groused someone sleepily from the other side of the room._

_“Does that make us even?” Louis asked, ignoring whoever it was. “A bit?”_

_Liam didn’t immediately respond. But eventually, reluctantly, he concluded: “A bit.”_

_“Good.”_

_“The next person who speaks, I’m chucking a shoe, and I’m gonna keep chucking shoes until you either shut the hell up or someone beats you to death to get me to stop chucking shoes,” the voice warned._

_Louis was only quiet for a moment. Then: “You can tell your mum we’re mates.”_

_Liam did not respond, but when a shoe came sailing out of the dark and, with frightening accuracy, glanced off Louis’ forehead – “Ah! Fuck’s sake, mate!” “Well, pack it in, then!” – Louis was confident that he heard a quiet snicker from the next bed._

_-_

By the time it gets dark, the rain has set in again, beating tirelessly against the sides of the old house.  Harry lights a lamp and cautiously makes his way to the bottom of the stairs.

 

“Louis?”

 

There is a creak above him. A long moment later, Louis appears at the balcony. “If you’re going to be here, you might as well be useful. Run me a bath.”

 

Harry could not have been more surprised, but he conceals it well, he thinks.

 

After a moment’s hesitation, during which time Louis disappears into the darkened upper corridors of the house again, Harry sets his foot on the bottom step and begins the ascent toward the landing. He hasn’t been upstairs except for his brief attempt to locate Louis earlier, and he’s not sure what he was expecting.

 

It’s no cleaner up here than it is downstairs, although he can tell by the state of the bedroom he passes that at least this part of the house is often lived-in. He manages not to take more than a glance inside, though he hastily looks away when he sees Louis’ shape cross the room across the dim glow cast by the electric lamp at his bedside.

 

The only other room with a light on turns out to be the bathroom, and this, too, looks like it used much more frequently than most of the rooms downstairs. There is a rack with several towels hung upon it, though Harry can’t spot any that look like they haven’t been used. The cupboard is mostly bare, but for a shaving kit and a toothbrush. The sink has a ring of slime around the drain that makes Harry determined to focus his cleaning efforts here the following day.

 

The tub has a curtain spotted with mould that Harry pushes out of the way, kneeling next to the fixtures as he turns them on. The faucet sputters, the pipes groaning, but after a moment or two a steady stream of clear water begins. Harry adjusts the temperature and then plugs the drain, drying his hands absently on his trousers as he turns around, looking for something to add to the bath water.

 

The closest thing that he finds is a fresh bar of soap in the back of the cupboard, so he swishes it around in the water a little. He is so startled that the bar squirts out of his hand and escapes from him when Louis speaks behind him.

 

“Very dedicated to this, aren’t you?”

 

Harry has to use both hands to catch the bar of soap once more, and he casts it a traitorous look as he sets it on the edge of the tub.

 

“I don’t know what you usually do,” Harry says defensively. “If you want, you can keep an eye on this while I go downstairs and make you a cup of tea.”

 

Louis eyes him.

 

Harry sighs. “With whiskey.”

 

“Well, go on, then.” Louis steps aside pointedly to let Harry out past him.

 

Harry doesn’t hurry through making the tea, giving the tub time to fill up. By the time he returns, Louis has turned the water off and is down to his shorts. Harry stops short in the doorway.

 

Louis’ hip and upper thigh are a gnarl of scar tissue, deep pink and striated, fading to white around the edges and disappearing under his waistband only to reappear out from under the leg of his shorts. The skin is pocked and speckled with damage nearly all the way up to his bottom rib, though the worst of it is spread lower. The shorts hide what Harry suspects is the worst of it.

 

He quickly sets the tea aside, unsure of what to do but knowing somehow that he will have to do something.

 

Louis scowls. “I can’t sit on my own. Well, I can. But I… it’s more trouble than it’s worth.”

 

Harry comes forward at once, but then stops, hovering. “Do you want to - ?” He indicates the shorts.

 

“I’ll keep them on, thanks.” Louis’ tone is very final. Harry suspects that he is right about the scarring being worse where he can’t see.

 

“I’m going to put my arm around you,” Harry says, before he does it, slipping it around under Louis’ shoulders. “And then you step in and I’ll – here, now I’ll switch – ”

 

Harry tries not to watch Louis’ face as he lowers him into the water, but he can tell from the hiss that escapes from Louis’ gritted teeth that even with help, this is barely bearable. Once Louis is sitting, he sinks back, leaning against the rear of the tub, and closes his eyes.

 

“Thanks,” he says. “It’s particularly bad when it rains.”

 

Harry doesn’t need to ask him what he means. “Does the heat help?”

 

“Not as much as the alcohol. Where’s my tea?”

 

Harry turns around with a bit of a start, having forgotten that he had brought up a cup. Fetching it off the counter by the sink, he sets it down on the side of the tub for Louis.

 

“Shrapnel,” Louis says, without having to be asked. He doesn’t open his eyes when he speaks, but he reaches out and neatly collects the cup of tea as though his spatial awareness doesn’t rely on sight. “They never get it all out, I don’t think. Every other lad’s got a chunk of it still buried in him somewhere, nowadays. Kind of the Germans to give us something to remember them by.”

 

“Is that why you were invalided home?” Harry asks.

 

“Yes. I walk much better now than I did then. The pain isn’t as bad now that it’s healed over, and anyway, I’ve gotten used to it.”

 

Harry thinks about the amount that Louis drinks and wonders if the pain really is any better.

 

“Can’t they do anything else for it?” he asks.

 

“Naught but give me drugs for the pain,” Louis says. “And I’ll be damned if I get back on those. At least when I drink I’m still myself.”

 

“You know,” Harry says, “if you want – if there’s anything you need, that you can’t do yourself, I’m happy to – ”

 

“Don’t do that.” Louis’ voice is sharp. “I asked for help tonight, didn’t I? If I need it, I’ll ask. But I usually don’t need it.”

 

Harry frowns, but he doesn’t give in. “I’ll make up some heat pouches for you, so you can have them at night.”

 

Louis reaches up with a wet hand to push his hair back out of his face, sounding more weary than irritated when he asks, “Are you going to allow me to bathe in peace, Harry?”

 

Harry hesitates, but ultimately takes a step back. “I’ll come back in an hour,” he says. “If you want to get out before then, you’ve only to shout.”

 

Louis glowers. “I’ll not be shouting.”

 

Harry spends the next hour listening for him anyway.

 

 


	3. I Do Not Want the Constellations Any Nearer

_“I hate ships.”_

_Zayn was leaning against the railing, looking decidedly pale, eyes red around the rims._

_Louis shook his head, stepping up onto the first rung to lean over and survey the side of the ship, down to where its dull metal hull met the lapping waves. “We’ve barely left the port yet.”_

_“I hate the sea,” Zayn continued. “It makes me sick. And I can’t swim.”_

_“This isn’t the sea,” Louis said. “It’s the Channel. It barely qualifies.”_

_“The Channel is the sea,” Liam replied. “It’s part of it. I remember that from lessons. And anyway, if you don’t leave him be, he’s going to toss his lunch all over your shoes.”_

_“Don’t talk about it,” Zayn moaned._

_Louis grinned, but let the matter drop. The horizon was vast and grey ahead of them, a solid mass of cloud that didn’t promise a storm but successfully blocked any of the cheery daylight out._

_“What do you lads reckon? Either of you been to France before?”_

_Liam shook his head. “I don’t imagine it would still look like it did, anyway.”_

_“Aye, but the important bits are still there,” Louis said. “The Eiffel Tower, and whatnot. And haven’t they got vineyards?”_

_“We’ll not be seeing the Eiffel Tower unless you’ve got a convincing German accent I’ve not heard yet,” Zayn said, his eyes firmly fixed on the deck of the boat, holding tightly to the rail._

_“I’m sure we’ll be liberating it at some point,” Louis said, with a wave of his hand._

_Liam looked doubtful. “Yeah, probably not us, personally.”_

_“All the same, Liam, the Huns aren’t going to be occupying Paris forever,” Louis said, exasperatedly. “At some point they’ll go crying back to Berlin, and then we’ll have the place to ourselves.”_

_“You, me, Liam, and four million Frenchmen,” Zayn said dryly._

_“Excuse me, weren’t we talking about vomit?”_

_Zayn flipped Louis the v-sign even as he leaned over the rail again._

 

-

 

When Harry helps Louis out of the bathtub later, he finds him quieter than he anticipated, and surprisingly more able. He looks tired, but the climb to his feet isn’t nearly as bad as the reverse was, and he scowls at Harry and proceeds to very pointedly dry himself off before shooing Harry out so that he can change into dry shorts.

 

Later, when Harry tucks heat pouches in around his hip, Louis does not even rearrange them, as Harry was expecting. His eyes are closed before Harry leaves the room, and Harry wonders at that strangeness of that, at the implication, that Louis’ intense dislike of appearing vulnerable can be trumped by the desire to fall asleep before the warmth of the bath wears off and the ache sets in again.

 

-

 

_Louis was fairly certain that the wall they were taking refuge behind had once been a garden wall. It was curiously very much like the ones back home in England, from the texture of the stone to the way the grass had begun to grow tall around it. A few feet away from the toe of his boot was what looked like a trampled tomato plant, smashed fruit oozing into the earth._

_They had been shot at already. That was not a totally new experience for Louis, who had been shot at once before as a child for stealing from an orchard, but it had certainly woken them all up. Liam, who was sitting next to Louis, had eyes that seemed to have gone permanently wide. Next to him, Zayn was nervously checking his gun._

_“You got a cigarette, Liam?” Louis asked._

_“Um.” Liam blinked at him, then quickly opened up his pack and rifled through. “I don’t think so. Sorry, mate.”_

_“Liam.” Louis glowered at him. “You checked and re-checked your bag about eighteen times this morning, and there is not a single cigarette inside of it.”_

_“You haven’t got any either,” Liam pointed out, less phased by Louis’ scolding than he once might have been._

_“Yes, but I’m irresponsible. Zayn?”_

_Without speaking, Zayn set aside his gun, delved into the outside pocket of his pack, and handed them across._

_“You shouldn’t keep them in the outside like that,” Louis told him, cupping a hand against the wind as he lit up. “They’re going to get wet if it rains.”_

_“And then apparently we’d all be out of luck,” Zayn replied, in a tone that so bordered on uncharacteristically snarky that Louis could only stare at him – and back off._

_“Two minutes until we move out, lads,” said Corporal Townsend, leaning around Niall to address them all the way down the line. “Be ready.”_

_“Move out where?” Liam asked. “Out there?”_

_“Forgive him, he and I tried to stand up at the same time this morning and brained each other on our helmets,” Louis said._

_“No, I just mean – there’s a load of open space.” Liam glanced around. “Isn’t there?”_

_“Yes, and we’ll all have to try very hard not to get killed in the first five seconds,” Louis said. “If you do, I shall laugh at you.”_

_“Don’t be a shit,” Liam said._

_“Lads, can I enjoy a cigarette without the two of you bickering?” Zayn asked._

_Again, it was so uncharacteristic of him to shut them down without any of his usual (slightly exasperated) good humour that they obliged him and fell silent._

_“If we could all stop talking about being killed,” Corporal Townsend said pleasantly._

_“No one’s going to get killed,” Liam said, as though trying to reassure them like a father reassures a group of children._

_“Well, some of us might, but talking about it is bad for morale.” Corporal Townsend jerked his head. “Let’s go. On my mark.”_

_As it turned out, their first battle was less a battle than half of them clearing a field while the other half provided covering fire, and then doing the same thing in reverse. Louis didn’t think that his heart had ever hammered like that in his life, like it was dragging him forward._

_It made him feel high._

_“If war is mostly being shot at,” he told Zayn, after they had set up a small camp under a cliff face to the east, far enough from the enemy encampment that there was some measure of safety. “And I’ve not yet been shot, then I think that all things considered I am doing very well indeed.”_

_“I was rather hoping that war was going to be mostly hiding behind a garden wall,” Liam said, wearing a faintly disgusted expression as he prodded muck off of his boots with a stick._

_“What garden wall?” Zayn asked._

_“The one from earlier,” Louis replied, surprised by the question._

_“I don’t think that was a garden wall.” Zayn took a deep drag on his cigarette, then reached over to stub it out on the ground._

_“There were tomatoes,” Louis pointed out._

_Zayn glanced over at him. “I don’t think those were tomatoes.”_

_Liam and Louis sat in stunned silence, letting that sink in._

_Zayn added: “We weren’t the first group of lads to come this way. The ground doesn’t get all – churned up like that without shelling. And people don’t necessarily make it through a shelling in one piece.”_

_Liam hastily resumed cleaning his boots, this time with more vigor._

 

-

 

 

_“The guns have stopped.”_

_Zayn’s voice crackled a little under the weight of the cold in his lungs, and, Louis suspected, far too many cigarettes in a habit that had intensified drastically in the opening days of their latest rotation to the front._

_“Maybe it’s because it’s Christmas,” Liam offered. He was sitting next to Zayn, the two of them sharing body heat bundled under a single overcoat. The coat belonged to neither of them. Louis could not have said where it had come from._

_“Is it Christmas?” Louis had known it was on its way, but there never seemed to be a coherent way of keeping track of the days, when they were on the move._

_Liam nodded. “Christmas Eve.” He shifted. “I’m going for a piss. Can’t feel my feet.”_

_As he rose stiffly, hoping to coax some blood circulation into his extremities, Louis took his place under the overcoat._

_“It’s quiet,” Zayn remarked, as Liam’s crunching footsteps in the frost grew fainter._

_“I think the Germans were singing in their bunker, earlier.” Louis had not recognized the song._

_“Did you write your mum?” Zayn was good about that – the best of them, in fact. His letters were pages on end of tiny, cramped writing that Louis told himself he couldn’t quite read, though he had no compunction about snooping into Liam’s mail._

_“Yeah. Awhile ago, now.”_

_Zayn shook his head. “Did you write her for Christmas?”_

_Louis glanced sidelong at him. “D’you even celebrate Christmas?”_

_Zayn nudged him under the overcoat. “Don’t be a shit.”_

_Louis shook his head. “Nah. Didn’t write her for Christmas. It’s hard to… I dunno. Imagine them all, at home. Doesn’t seem like Christmas could go on like usual when we’re here and the world is…” He gestured around; Zayn couldn’t see it, but it made the overcoat dimple. “Like this.”_

_Zayn nodded along, slowly. “You should write her, anyway. She’d like to hear from you.”_

_Louis knew he was right, but he also knew that he wouldn’t write. He never knew what to say._

_“A word of advice, lads.” Liam was returning, hands jammed under his armpits. “Do not get your knob out unless absolutely necessary. Bloody freezing.”_

_Louis stretched out his foot from under the overcoat. “What a class act you are, Payno.”_

_Liam deftly side-stepped the attempt to trip him up. “I’m only saying. It’s a practical suggestion. Is someone singing?”_

_The three of them fell silent. From far away, they heard the unmistakable melody of Silent Night, though the words were unfamiliar._

_The guns remained silent._

_“What do you reckon, lads?” Liam was watching as, further down the bunker, more soldiers were drifting tentatively out of foxholes and shelters. There was even an officer, head out of his dugout, ear cocked, listening._

_“There won’t be any Christmas truces this time around,” Louis said. “Not like the last war.”_

_“Maybe not,” Zayn agreed. “But it’s nice that the guns are quiet.”_

_The other two didn’t reply; the silence was too novel to waste._

_Louis only remembered later, after everyone was asleep, that it was his birthday._

 

-

 

_Louis’ whole body ached. Even the previously unnoticed act of breathing, of sucking air into his lungs and pushing it out, seemed strenuous; every inhalation felt like it bruised the insides of his lungs._

_Rolling over onto his side did not make things better; it made them worse. He nearly choked on it, the sound that welled up inside of him at the lightning that crackled through his ribs. It was very dark, and though it was quiet, he could not have said where precisely he was or who was nearby. It was better to stay silent._

_He tore off one of his mittens and stuffed it into his mouth. He had a hunch that he was going to need it._

_By the time he made it to his hands and knees, he was exhausted, but he knew he had to make it to his feet. The thick cluster of trees and the heavy darkness would conceal him from anyone watching, he was fairly certain, but he knew that he couldn’t afford to remain here until daybreak._

_The stars didn’t offer enough light for him to see the still bodies of his squad mates. He counted his blessings as he blindly rifled through their pockets and gear, looking for anything useful – a square of folded-up paper that might be a map, the cool casings of extra ammunition, or even food or a compass._

_“Louis.”_

_The sound of his own name made him freeze. He did not reply, though somewhere in his mind, he knew that of course the Germans would not be whispering to him._

_“Louis. Lou, it’s me.”_

_And then Louis recognized the voice, and some of the tension drained away._

_“Zayn?”_

_“We have to go.”_

_Icy fingers closed around Louis’ wrist, and he let Zayn guide them away. They spent most of the night in the meager shelter of a nearby cliff-face, and left at first light in the direction that they both agreed was likely to be west._

_It wasn’t until nearly midday when Louis said, “Did you see where Liam went, after the explosion?”_

_And, though Louis was unaccustomed to being ignored, he acknowledged the silence that followed as the only answer Zayn knew how to give._

_Louis reached out, closing cold fingers briefly around Zayn’s. Zayn didn’t respond, though when Louis released him, he turned his head very slightly. Louis picked up his pace a little, and they walked side by side through the snow toward what they hoped was safety._

 

-

 

_The thing about war was that there was both no time to examine your feelings and too much time in which to feel them. Louis found that on their long marches, his thoughts became very circular and he had not the energy to redirect them. Zayn was almost always silent now; not necessarily an effusive person to begin with, he now barely spoke unless he was asked a direct question._

_Louis almost preferred the long nights when they laid there without a sound, uncertain of whether each breath would be their last. Fear just makes you high, he told Zayn, once. It keeps you in the moment. It’s loss that doesn’t go away._

_It took them the better part of three days to find allies. Even then, the company of American commandos was not what they were looking for; the Americans were friendly enough, offering food and a night in their temporary camp, but then Louis and Zayn went on their way._

_Six days into their westward march, Louis almost didn’t register the rattle-snap of a machine gun until it was nearly too late. Zayn was faster; already on his belly, he reached out and knocked Louis behind the knees hard enough to bring him down. The spray in the snow behind him told Louis that Zayn had almost certainly saved his life._

_They stayed low, moving as quickly as they could to tree cover, and then ran for it. There were no more bullets after that; after what seemed like an interminable run, the winter air tearing into their lungs, they collapsed under the remains of a wooden shed and waited until they were sure they had not been followed._

_Zayn shared his last cigarette with Louis. Though he said nothing, the way his eyes tracked across Louis’ face made the latter realize that he was not compartmentalizing well enough. Liam’s death was getting in the way of his own survival._

_After that, he started paying more attention._

_That night, as they huddled together for warmth, Zayn tilted his head back and looked up. Whether because they were far from any appreciable civilization or because of the blackout or even because of the cold weather, there were too many stars to count. Louis glanced over and saw them reflected in Zayn’s eyes._

_“Never saw so much sky until I came out here,” he said. “In the city, there was always just… too much light, I reckon. Don’t think I even imagined there were this many stars.”_

_Louis didn’t respond, looking up too, now. The night sky seemed both far away and everywhere at once, all around them and trying to sneak in under their upturned collars and clenched fingers._

_“I always look for Orion,” Zayn added._

_Louis fervently wished for a cigarette. “Which one’s that?”_

_Zayn shifted so that he could free his hand and point up. “See those three bright stars? That’s his belt. And then there’s a star for his head and shoulders… a couple of smaller ones there look a bit like a dagger. You see it? It’s easier now, in the winter-time.”_

_Louis followed where he was pointing. “Yeah. I’ve seen those before, those three bright ones. I didn’t know they were part of a constellation.”_

_Zayn nodded, pulling his hand back into the warm of his jacket. “It’s named after a hunter in Greek mythology. My dad used to tell me about the constellations. I always liked that one the best.”_

_Louis was still looking up. “Why?”_

_Zayn shrugged a little. “It feels familiar. When I was a kid, it always made me feel like someone was keeping an eye on me. And then when I got older, it was nice to look up and see it when I was locking up the shop at night, and I had to walk home on my own. Felt like I wasn’t doing it alone. And now that we’re here, and I can still see it… it’s comforting.”_

_Louis could feel his neck starting to cramp, but he didn’t want to take his eyes off the sky. “Yeah. I could see that.” He was quiet for a moment. “You ever tell Liam about Orion?”_

_Zayn didn’t answer right away. His voice was quiet when he replied, “Yeah. A long time ago. Was easy, telling Liam stuff like that.”_

_Louis treaded carefully around the hairline crack that wove through Zayn’s voice. “Maybe he’s looking at him right now, too. You reckon?”_

_Zayn hunched in on himself a little. “I don’t know.”_

_When at last they found a town, they were fortunate that one of the local villagers spoke English. She told them that the British forces were camped less than five miles away, and when they followed her directions – always cautious, of course – they found that she was right._

_Their first night back in the camp, Louis didn’t bathe or shave, though he had planned on both. He simply went to sleep, and the hard camp bed felt like the most comfortable place he had ever been. He did not dream._

 


	4. I've Never Felt So Much Life, Than Tonight

_Spring was barely an improvement. Though the snow melted away and the air was warmer, the volume of mud increased correspondingly, and Louis spent much of his time scraping chunks of France off the bottom of his boots, lest it accumulate to the point where each step was more of a struggle than it was worth._

_When they rotated back into camp one day, he was sitting on the edge of a bunk debating whether he felt fit enough for human consumption to brave the mess hall, when a familiar voice made his heart surge._

_“I was cleaner than you in a German POW camp.”_

_Louis didn’t dare turn around. “I swear to God.”_

_And then he heard Zayn nearly fall out of his bunk, barely getting his feet under him, knocking a knee hard against the floor before stumbling to his feet. “Liam – “_

_And then Louis shot to his feet and spun around, and there was Liam engulfing Zayn in a hug. Zayn didn’t seem to be able to respond, arms ramrod straight at his sides, eyes wide._

_That was when Louis saw what he hadn’t seen before. As Liam held Zayn, tightly, Louis gave them a moment to themselves. Perhaps he had seen it, he thought, but he hadn’t allowed it to register._

_Liam turned his head, pressing his face into Zayn’s neck. “Missed you.”_

_Louis felt almost as though he was infringing upon something private._

_When the hug finally ended, Louis acted at once, so as not to give the impression that he had been watching too closely. “What, were you so insufferable that the Germans gave you back?”_

_Liam came around the bed, smiling, and Louis hugged him too. He saw Zayn over Liam’s shoulder, standing there, eyes still wide._

_That was when he thought that perhaps Zayn hadn’t registered it either._

_-_

_Whatever had happened in the POW camp, it gave Liam nightmares._

_Louis woke up sometimes in the deepest, darkest parts of the night, looking around wildly, only to discover that the source of the sound that had woken him was Liam, thrashing and twisting in the next bed._

_Louis woke him from one of those dreams only once. Slipping out of bed, he crossed the short distance between them and reached for Liam’s shoulder to give him a shake._

_Liam awoke immediately, throwing himself at Louis. With no time to catch his footing, Louis went down, Liam on top of him. Frighteningly efficient, Liam slammed his knee down on Louis’ chest to hold him still and wrapped a hand around his neck._

_Louis, seeing stars, scrabbled at Liam’s face and chest before he found his eyes and dug his fingers in. Liam grunted and fell back, and Louis scrambled away, scraping the skin off of his knuckles in his haste to grab for the bed post and yank himself upright._

_“Liam,” Louis hissed, hands raised, ready to defend himself. “For fuck’s sake, it’s me.”_

_Liam was halfway to his feet, on one knee, breathing heavily. But he stopped._

_“Liam.” Louis said his name again, less sharply this time, even though his own heart was still pounding. “It was a dream, mate. You were having a nightmare.”_

_Liam sat down slowly on the floor. “Louis?”_

_Louis, cautiously, stepped forward and sat down, too. “Lower your voice or you’ll wake everyone in the camp, if you haven’t already.”_

_Liam shook his head. “I’m sorry. I don’t… know what happened.”_

_Louis watched him for a long moment. He debated asking what Liam had been dreaming about, but he realized with a flash of guilt that he wasn’t sure that he wanted to know. “Well,” he said, reaching out to tap Liam’s foot. “You’re alright now, yeah? Provided you don’t try to murder me again. Then I’m not sure I’ll be able to be held responsible for my actions.”_

_Liam looked up, and his eyes were hard to look at. It made Louis immediately sorry for being so flip. “I’m really sorry, Lou. I don’t think I… knew you were you.”_

_“That’s debatable; I’m sure you’ve wanted to murder me on occasion. Just don’t let it happen again.”_

_Liam didn’t smile._

_Louis climbed to his feet, reaching out for Liam’s hand to help him up, too. “You alright to go back to sleep?”_

_Liam hesitated. “You want to go out for a smoke?”_

_“Yeah, alright.” Louis fetched his jacket, pulling it on briskly as he cast a glance at Zayn, who slept on soundly. “Probably for the best. We’ll never hear the end of it if we wake sleeping beauty over there.”_

_Liam looked suddenly slightly ill. “I’m glad it wasn’t him who tried to wake me.”_

_Louis considered that for only a second. “Aye, well. Not worth thinking about, is it?” Then he reached out and clasped Liam on the shoulder, leading him outside._

_-_

Now that Harry’s been around the upper floor of the house, he feels much braver. It is as though he has broken some kind of spell, and now he can much more easily imagine himself moving freely about the place. He rises early and sets about making breakfast, assembling sausages, eggs, fried tomatoes, beans, and toast on a plate. The house, in his own opinion, smells amazing, but he does not hear Louis stir upstairs as he navigates the front hall and the stairs with a plate in one hand and a cup of tea in the other.

 

Reaching the upstairs landing, he pauses to let his eyes adjust to the dim light. The curtains over the window at the end of the hall are slightly ajar, but the light they let in through the dirty window beyond is dull and faded, illuminating only dust motes that swirl aimlessly through the air.

 

He makes his way to Louis’ bedroom and, stumped by the fact that his hands are full, attempts to knock on the door with his elbow.

 

There is no movement in the bedroom beyond.

 

Harry sighs, and gingerly sets the cup of tea down on the dusty carpet. Reaching for the knob, he eases the door open and then stoops to retrieve the tea.

 

“Louis?” He steps into the room.

 

It is even darker in here. There is a bed in the corner with a rather shabby blanket, and a night table next to it with a lamp on top of it. Clothing is folded mostly neatly, but stacked on the floor rather than in the wardrobe.

 

Louis is a huddled shape in the bed, and he still doesn’t move as Harry approaches and sets the plate and tea down next to the lamp.

 

“Louis,” he repeats, reaching out to gently give his shoulder a shake.

 

Louis’ fingers are like steel as they close around his wrist. Harry makes a sound, more because he is startled than anything else, but also because it _hurts._

 

Louis half-sits up, reaching out to turn on the lamp. When light floods the room and he sees who he’s got in his grip, he releases Harry at once and frowns rather mightily.

 

“Harry, for god’s sake. Why are you in my room?”

 

He seems, Harry thinks, very annoyed but not furious, which is progress.

 

“I, um. I thought you might like breakfast.”

 

Louis glances away, noticing the plate of food and the tea for the first time. He pushes himself into a proper seated position, wincing at the pain in his hip, and Harry immediately starts forward to prop pillows up behind him. Louis scowls but doesn’t stop him, reaching over to retrieve the plate.

 

“What time is it?”

 

“Nearly eight,” Harry says.

 

Louis freezes. “ _Eight?_ In the morning?”

 

“You’d know that it was morning if you ever opened the curtains,” Harry says brightly.

 

“I’m going to eat this,” Louis says, indicating the food with his fork. “But then I am going back to sleep. And you are _not_ to disturb me.”

 

“Alright,” Harry says, undeterred. “I was thinking I might do some more cleaning today. Start at the end of the hallway, work my way this way.”

 

“You don’t need to clean in here,” Louis says. “I like it the way it is.”

 

Harry turns to survey the room. “Well, I can at least run the vacuum over, and take the curtains down for a wash. And I can put those clothes in the wardrobe.”

 

“I said,” Louis says, with an ounce of impatience, “I like it the way it is.”

 

Harry lets it go for now, but he is determined that this will not be the last they speak of it.

 

“I used to leave my clothes all about,” Louis says, head bent over his food. Harry turns to look at him at once, finding it once again novel that Louis will share things about his life but only if he is not asked. “Proper disaster. I learned how to be tidy in the army. That’s the only reason all of that’s been folded and stacked.”

 

“Then why don’t you put them in the wardrobe?” Harry asks.

 

Louis shrugs.

 

Harry leaves that alone, too. “I was thinking I’ll finish tidying downstairs once I finish up here. Since you use this part of the house more, may as well do this first.”

 

“Leave my study alone,” Louis warns. “I like the mess. And I have paperwork in there that isn’t any of your business.”

 

Harry opens his mouth, but then closes it. “What if I just – ”

 

Louis makes eye contact. “Do not. I’m not asking.”

 

Harry blinks. “Okay.” He’ll have to come back to that, too. It seems like there are more roadblocks than there are easy topics of conversation, with Louis. But Harry is a very determined sort of person.

 

Absently rubbing his wrist, Harry takes a few steps toward the window, itching to open the curtains.

 

Louis’ voice stops him, but not for the reason he was expecting. Instead of asking him not to let the light in, he says, “Did I hurt you?”

 

He has stopped eating, eyes traveling from Harry’s wrist to his face.

 

“Oh, I – not really,” Harry says, immediately letting go of it and tucking both hands behind his back.

 

“Let me see it.”

 

Harry hesitates.

 

Louis very nearly rolls his eyes. “Let me see it, and I’ll let you put my clothes in the wardrobe.”

 

More out of curiosity than anything else, Harry steps closer to the bed and extends his wrist for Louis’ inspection.

 

Louis sets aside his plate, taking Harry’s hand and turning it over. “Not bruised,” he notes. “I’m sorry I grabbed you.”

 

When he releases Harry’s hand, it takes Harry a handful of seconds to pull it back. “You didn’t mean it,” he says. “I shouldn’t have startled you. I know you’ve… been through a lot.”

 

Louis nods. He takes up his plate again, and says nothing as Harry pulls back the curtains, letting the daylight spill in, and turns toward the clothing piled against the wall.

_-_

_It was still dark. Louis had something caught in his teeth, and he had spent the better part of half an hour trying to work it free with his tongue and, ultimately, with his fingers._

_“Shouldn’t put those in your mouth, son.” Corporal Townsend called everyone ‘son’, despite being, at most, three or four years older than Louis himself. “Don’t know where they’ve been, do you?”_

_“I know exactly where they’ve been, actually,” Louis retorted, with next to no heat. The Corporal may have been his commanding officer, but they had spent too much time together and Louis knew far too many of his idiosyncrasies to be overly polite. “A great many disgusting places, as it happens. But I haven’t got a choice, because if I don’t get this bit of – mystery chunk out of my teeth, I shall go mad and murder everyone in the regiment.”_

_“Do you want to borrow my knife?”_

_Louis glowered. “You’ve had a knife this whole time and you’ve been holding out? You know what, no. I shall – persevere. Out of spite.”_

_The Corporal looked slightly bemused, but did not push the matter._

_There was a quiet swell of noise on the radio._

_“What the hell?” Louis asked. “Thought they were giving us until sun-up?”_

_The Corporal shrugged. “Maybe they’re thinking we’ll be harder to spot in the dark.”_

_Louis checked his clip and climbed to his feet, staying low behind the embankment. “So will the Germans.” The silent ‘_ you knob’ _remained implied only because the Corporal outranked him._

_The Corporal examined his own gun. “Mine’s jammed twice now. I sent home for the money to replace it but the goddamn mail takes a fucking year and a half to leave the country here. Some General probably rolled it all up and used it to light his cigar.”_

_“My uncle did that before the Depression,” Louis mused. “Lit cigars with five-pound notes.”_

_“Well, I meant that he lit his cigar with my letter but I suppose not giving a shit whether I get my replacement weapon is just as likely. You want to trade?”_

_Louis laughed. “Fuck off, do I want to trade.”_

_“Look at it. Perfect condition.” The Corporal held it out._

_“Yeah, except that sometimes it doesn’t shoot bullets, which is the express function of a gun.” Louis pushed it back toward him. “Keep it. Maybe you can knock a Hun about the head with it.”_

_Their plan of attack was actually not completely idiotic, for once. (Louis had a lot of ideas about how things should be run around here, which had resulted in him facing disciplinary action more than once. He never disobeyed a direct order in an actual combat situation, though – he knew himself enough to know that if any of his friends were killed as a result, he would never be able to live with himself.) They were coming around the largely-unprotected rear of an occupied village, and so far, based on the intel they had, it seemed like it might legitimately prove to be a surprise to the Germans encamped there._

_The reason why the rear was unprotected, of course, was that it was difficult to access. There was a low embankment, then an extremely thin line of trees, then a lake. The lads had spent the previous night fording its freshly-frozen surface, crawling on their bellies so as to distribute their weight, holding their breaths every time there was a shift or crack in the ice. The fact that no one had raised the alarm had indicated to them that whatever forces were stationed here did not have the resources to post so much as a sentry to watch their backs._

_Louis braced himself as he and the other lads came over the edge of the embankment, silent and low, but there was no immediate sign of movement from the village. The air was very still, and Louis could see his breath in just the light from the crescent moon._

_They reached the village wall without incident. Louis’ heart had been in his throat for the last thirty feet or so, confident that the near-silent crunch of their footsteps in the new-fallen snow would give them up. Through a gap in the wall left by shelling, they filed slowly, weapons at the ready._

_“I don’t like this,” Louis said softly. “It feels like they’re going to bottle-neck us.”_

_“Intel says they’ve got their forces clustered by the main gate,” Liam replied, barely breathing the words. Even so, it was enough to make Zayn wave at them to be quiet._

_Louis was so focused on the darkened houses that loomed over the alleyway that the German soldier who walked around the corner made every muscle in his body clench, heart lurching badly. The man was glancing back over his shoulder, and Louis would think later that he was likely just looking for a dark spot to piss._

_The Corporal raised his rifle and brought it down on the soldier’s head. He crumpled at once, without making a sound._

_Louis nearly laughed, mouthing, “See? Gun’s good for something.”_

_And then a voice rang out from nearby. “_ Erich? Wo bist du? _”_

_This time, there was the sound of multiple sets of boots approaching. The Corporal stepped over the prone body of the first soldier and raised his weapon. Louis raised his, too._

_The footsteps stopped._

_Louis’ sense of foreboding grew. He waited, gun ready, shoulders relaxed, his eyes open and fixed on that corner for so long that he felt them grow dry and start to prickle._

_The Corporal turned to indicate that they should fall back, and take up a safer position on the far side of the wall. Louis could hear the others moving behind him, but he did not move yet. Something didn’t feel right and he didn’t want to be caught with his back turned._

_Someone stepped out from around the corner almost in slow motion. The Corporal squeezed the trigger but Louis heard the tell-tale sound of it locking and his brain went,_ twice, fire twice _, but he simply wasn’t fast enough. The first soldier went down, but the second had time to shoot the Corporal before turning his gun on Louis._

_Louis killed him, narrowly the first to get the shot off, though he never thought about it that way later. It would always seem like it had happened in slow motion, that he would never get there in time, but somehow he had._

_A hair’s breadth of time passed in silence. Then Louis slung his gun over his shoulder, grabbed the Corporal under his arms, and hauled him up onto his back. The sound of the gunfire had been like a beacon in the otherwise silent pre-sunrise, and he could hear voices getting closer. Further away, the chatter of guns started up, too._

_“Christ, you’re heavy,” he muttered, feeling like the weight of the other man was pushing down on his lungs. When he came clambering through the crack in the wall and saw the others waiting for orders, he wordlessly waved his arm, unable to pick out the right words or focus on anything but the drumbeat of running feet behind him and the warm wetness of someone else’s blood seeping through his clothing._

_Zayn understood at once. “Fall back!”_

_No one questioned the order. Instead they began making their way back across the field, though day had begun breaking in the past few minutes and it no longer felt safe, shrouded in darkness. When the firing began from behind them, they had no choice but to drop where they stood, find as much cover as they could in the torn-up grass, and return fire._

_Louis set the Corporal down with a grunt in a shallow dip in the earth. “Keep your head down,” he muttered, balancing his gun on the lip of the recently-formed crater and squeezing a few shots off. The Corporal wheezed and didn’t reply. Louis thought,_ at least he’s not dead yet and I didn’t carry him all this way for nothing.

_Their reinforcements made themselves known just in time, starting up a cacophony of covering fire from embedded turrets and bigger artillery hidden in the woods. Louis glanced over at the Corporal, whose face was very pale._

_“Here we go again, sir.”_

_Louis hoisted him up, stumbling a little on the uneven grass, and made a break for the woods. He ran blindly, avoiding obstacles as they arose at the last second – a large stone here, the dark sprawl of a body there._

_When at least he cleared the embankment and made it into the trees, he let the Corporal down gently onto the grass and lifted his head, looking around for help._

_“Tomlinson.” The Sergeant’s voice was immediate and close-by. Louis had to plug one ear and turn his head, ear facing the Sergeant,  in order to hear him over the sound of the guns as he rose to his feet._

_“Yes, Sergeant.”_

_“I’m promoting you.”_

_Louis had to turn to look at him. “What?”_

_The Sergeant was already striding away. Louis broke into a run and repeated his question._

_“I said, I’m promoting you.” He did not slow down or even turn to look at Louis, though he did turn to stop another soldier rushing by and issue an order before he addressed Louis again. “I’m busy right now. If you’d like to have a discussion over tea and biscuits, we can have it later.”_

_“No – no discussion, sir. I’m just curious – what is it you’re promoting me to?”_

_The Sergeant looked at him like he had lost his mind. “Corporal.”_

_“We have a Corporal, sir,” Louis said, feeling like he had lost the plot somewhere._

_“No, you haven’t. That one’s dead.”_

_That startled Louis. He glanced back over his shoulder at where he had left the Corporal. “Townsend is dead?”_

_The Sergeant bent in close. “Do you need me to find someone less important than me to stand here so you can ask them stupid questions while you sort this out?”_

_Louis could only shake his head. “No, Sergeant.”_

_“Excellent. This is a battlefield promotion, Tomlinson. I’ll have the paperwork drawn up later. For now consider yourself the acting Corporal in your unit and behave accordingly.”_

_The Sergeant strode away. This time, Louis did not follow him._

_He turned to look back over his shoulder again, at the unmoving mass he had carried across the battlefield. At some point in the last hundred feet between their makeshift bunker and the embankment, Townsend had died. Louis felt a very sudden, very real stab of guilt for the thought he had had about carrying the Corporal for nothing._

_By the time the guns stopped, the small handful of Germans remaining in the village had surrendered. Louis chose a small house with a fireplace in the front room, and he, Zayn, Liam, and four others bunked down in there together._

_“If you want,” Liam said eventually, “I think I know someone who’s got some sherry on him, if you’d like to celebrate.”_

_“Celebrate?” Louis echoed. “Seems odd, doesn’t it? I got a job because someone died.”_

_“That’s the only way anyone gets a promotion now,” Zayn said. “Go on, Liam. Some sherry would be nice. Warm us up a bit better.”_

_Louis glanced over at Zayn once Liam had left the proximity of the fire. “Should I be pleased, you reckon?”_

_Zayn shrugged. His eyes looked like ink, with the reflection of the fire darting erratically across them like it was afraid of being swallowed. “Better pay, isn’t it?”_

_“Aye, but for what?” Louis asked. “If I make enough money, they’ll expect me to buy a new uniform. Can’t be arsed.”_

_“You could send it home to your mum,” Zayn suggested._

_“I already do that,” Louis replied. “I suppose she’ll be pleased with a bit more coming in. She can take the hoard to the pictures or something nice.”_

_“The hoard,” Zayn repeated with a smile._

_“Every time I look, there are more of them,” Louis said. “I think there’s about two dozen now.”_

_“Every time you talk about them, there are more of them,” Zayn replied._

_Louis leaned forward, fetched up a small log, and tossed it into the fire. “I hope she doesn’t ask why I’ve been promoted.”_

_“She will,” Zayn said. “But you don’t have to tell her that it was because someone died. I don’t think the Sergeant would have just promoted anyone.”_

_“I think he would have,” Louis said, with feeling. “If it had been you carrying his body, or Liam, you’d have been promoted, not me.”_

_“That’s the thing, though, isn’t it,” Zayn said. “You carried him back. You could have left him.”_

_“Well, I couldn’t have, because I thought was alive, didn’t I? He_ was _alive, at the beginning.”_

_“Even so. You don’t have to carry wounded soldiers back, not if it puts you in danger. Not unless you’re a medic, which you aren’t.”_

_Louis frowned. “Not being an arse doesn’t merit a promotion, I don’t think.”_

_“Well, obviously not, or you’d not have got one,” Liam said cheerfully, returning victorious with a bottle of dark liquid in his hand. “Drinks? I haven’t fetched our cups out of our packs, thought we could just drink it right out of the bottle.”_

_“You’ll return from war an absolute heathen,” Louis warned, taking the bottle from him. “Your mum won’t know what to do with you. She’ll ask where that nice boy Louis Tomlinson is, and why you haven’t followed his example and stayed on the straight and narrow.”_

_“You wouldn’t know straight and narrow if it chewed your eyebrows off, mate,” Liam told him. “As an aside, yeah? Corporal Townsend and I were in school together, as you lads know. I used to talk to him the odd time, about this and that. He had a chance to suggest lads for a promotion. He didn’t – suggest you, I’m afraid.”_

_“Well, that’s not a great surprise, is it?” Louis asked. “He knew me. Absolutely rubbish at following procedures. Shockingly bad.”_

_“No, but – he said he had thought about it because, you know. The other lads listen to you.”_

_Louis looked over at him. Liam never lied, so it had to be true. “You lads do, maybe. But only to humour me, I’m sure.”_

_“Nah, mate. All the lads.” Liam tilted his head to indicate the other four, stretched out on the floor in the kitchen and the hall. “I think putting you in charge is a good idea, anyway. You’re not nearly as much of a shit when you’re getting your way.”_

_Louis deliberately knocked him in the knee with the bottle when he passed it over. “Cheers. Arsehole.”_

 

-

_“Budge up, lads,” Louis said, and without waiting for a corresponding shuffle-down from the other two, wedged his bottom next to Zayn’s on the narrow bench. “I’ve just heard; we’ll be away off back to England tomorrow.”_

_It was not raining, for once; the three of them were outside the canteen, soaking up the sunshine. Zayn had his head tilted back, eyes closed, but when he heard what Louis said, he smiled._

_“I’ll be honest,” Liam said. “The bit I’m most excited for is to have a cup of tea at my own kitchen table and fall asleep in my own bed.”_

_“Oh, no you don’t,” Louis said at once. “Fun first, comforts of home second. We’re going out. First round of pints of me.”_

_“I’d like to go out,” Zayn agreed, musingly. “Not normally much for going out. But I’m in the mood.”_

_“Well, obviously we’re going out,” Liam said. “I only meant, after all of the going out, I’m keen to have a proper rest.”_

_You never really did have a proper rest in France, even when you weren’t out on the front lines. Liam didn’t have to say that part aloud for the other two to understand._

_“You know what we should do?” Louis said suddenly._

_“What’s that?” Liam asked._

_Louis didn’t answer, rising. “Back in a tick.”_

_Liam shook his head. “What’s he on about?”_

_Zayn still didn’t open his eyes. “Something harebrained, invariably.”_

_Moments later, Louis jogged back toward them with a skinny lad in tow, fair-haired and clutching a camera._

_“This is Niall,” Louis said, presenting him to the other two as though he hadn’t been on their squad and they somehow had never met him. Liam shook his hand when Niall offered it, a little mystified. “He takes photos,” Louis carried on, obviously unimpressed by their reaction. “Documenting camp life, and that. We should get him to take one of us.”_

_“Not exactly camera-ready,” Zayn said, sitting up properly and running a hand back through his hair, a little self-consciously._

_“No one here’s been camera-ready since they left England, mate,” Louis said. “Anyway, you’re naturally prettier than Liam so at least you’ve got that going for you.”_

_“Hey,” Liam protested._

_“Look at his face, Liam,” Louis said. “Look at it. Hewn by the gods, that nose.”_

_“Shut it,” Zayn said, ducking his head._

_Louis grinned. “Don’t think I haven’t seen you side-eyeing your reflection in the back of my breakfast spoon. Now, come on. Stand up, straighten your uniforms, look respectable.”_

_Zayn and Liam exchanged glances as they stood up, Liam rather self-consciously adjusting his collar._

_“Right, come on then. How do you want us?” That question was for Niall, who waved them away from standing directly in front of the late afternoon sun._

_“Right, lads.” Niall looked at them through the view-finder. “You going to smile, or what?”_

_The first photo was a little stiff, the three of them standing next to one another, smiling their best school smiles._

_“You can, you know…” Niall waved a hand at them, still watching them through the viewfinder. “Act like you like each other, yeah?”_

_Liam reached out and hooked the two of them in rather abruptly, which prompted an exclamation from Louis as he stumbled into Liam’s side. Zayn laughed at his expression of outrage, and suddenly they were like schoolboys with a fit of the giggles._

_They didn’t notice when the shutter went off. Niall nodded approvingly. “Reckon that one’ll turn out alright.”_

 

_-_

_“Fucking London, lads!” Louis spun in a circle. “I love this town.”_

_“No you don’t,” Liam said, amused. His arm was draped loosely around Zayn’s shoulder, as the two of them strolled rather more sedately behind Louis. “You were saying before we shipped out that you thought it was filthy and there were too many people here.”_

_“It is filthy,” Louis agreed. “And there are too many people here. But London is nearly Doncaster, and tomorrow I’ll be away home to see the little lasses before we have to go back to France. And anyway, I’ve not been shot at a single time since we disembarked.”_

_“And,” Zayn put in, “they have beer. In unlimited quantities.”_

_“Yeah, alright,” Liam said, with an undercut of sarcasm that he absolutely had to have learned from Louis. “You both love London.”_

_“I mainly like being here with you lads,” Zayn said, to a raspberry from Louis._

_“Don’t be a shit,” Liam said, swatting at Louis, who danced easily out of his reach. “He’s right. It’s nice that we’re all here, spending some time together not frightened out of our wits or knee-deep in mud.”_

_“Yeah, alright,” Louis allowed. “It is nice. I haven’t had a proper night out in ages.”_

_“You know what we should do,” Zayn said, reaching out to brush his fingers against Louis’ sleeve. “We should get tattoos. Matching ones.”_

_“We’re not getting tattoos,” Louis said. “What on earth of? I’m not getting each of your names tattooed on my arse cheeks.”_

_“I rather think it would be an improvement,” Liam replied. The corresponding push Louis gave him nearly knocked him off the curb, but he didn’t stop smiling, nor did he relinquish his grip on Zayn._

_Later that night, when they made their way back to the rooms they’d rented above a pub, Liam helped Zayn into one room, and Louis shuffled into the other. He took his boots off, and, in a fit of whimsy, tossed them at the adjoining wall between the two rooms. After a moment, there was a corresponding thump on the other side. He grinned._


	5. Living in the Rapture/All the Feelings After

The next morning, Harry has made up his mind: Today is the day he will clean out Louis’ study. There’s such a thick layer of dust over everything and papers stacked haphazardly on every surface that it’s no wonder that Louis doesn’t want to sit down in there and get any work done.

 

Once again, Louis does not surface as Harry gets dressed and gathers together his cleaning supplies, tying his hair back with a scarf. The house above him is totally silent as Harry makes his way into the study; he takes it as consent for what he’s about to do.

 

Because, he realizes, as he begins to shift loose papers into stacks in the middle of the room for sorting, this feels a little bit like prying into a part of Louis that he didn’t necessarily want Harry to see. This room, as far as Harry can tell, has been untouched by anyone but Louis for quite some time; these papers, some written in what Harry recognizes as Louis’ handwriting from the draft notes on his first book, some written in other, tidier hands, are meant for Louis’ eyes alone. Harry resolves not to read any of them, though he can’t help but catch snippets as he moves them… _would have been nice to see you… coming home at Christmas… miss us at all…_

 

By the time he’s finished, it’s nearly half ten. Harry remembers suddenly that this room _does_ have natural light, and he goes to the window behind Louis’ desk at once to push the dusty drapes aside.

 

Sunlight pours in through a window so filthy that Harry has a hard time seeing what’s outside, though he knows, because of the room’s location in the house, that he must be looking out onto the overgrown back garden.

 

Of course Louis would pick the room furthest from the road to work in.

 

Turning, Harry is struck at once by how the desk looks in this light. Absent of loose papers, it is almost bare, save for the lamp and the typewriter. There are neat lines of dust all along the edges of where the papers were, and a layer on the lamp and its light bulb.

 

The only thing that doesn’t have any dust on it at all is the typewriter.

 

It makes Harry’s heart rate pick up. Why would Louis keep the typewriter clean if he weren’t going to bother to write? Immediately, Harry’s mind casts back over the papers he’s been stacking in the middle of the room, and before he knows it, he’s next to the pile, picking through the stack. Most of the typed papers are from the first book, mistakes that didn’t make it to publication. But the rest, maybe –

 

Harry sits down on the floor.

_-_

 

_“Christ. Is France ever fucking warm?”_

_Louis had his hands wedged under his bottom, hunched forward against the cold. Under the light of the thousands of stars strewn across the sky, he could see his own breath hanging in the air. There was no wind; it was as if the air itself had stopped, arrested mid-flight by the plunging temperature._

_“I feel like it’s been winter forever,” Liam responded. Zayn wasn’t with them; he had spent the last three days back at camp in medical, coughing up some kind of brackish fluid that they all assumed was some kind of chest infection but wouldn’t know for sure until Zayn’s return._

_“Let’s not talk about it,” Louis decided. “Fucking impossible not to think about it, but there you are. Let’s not talk about it just to spite it.”_

_“Just to spite… the winter?” Liam asked slowly._

_“Yes, Liam. To spite the bloody winter. And then we’ll move to Tenerife after the war and dare it to come and get us.”_

_“I can’t move to Tenerife after the war,” Liam replied, amiable, because at this point he was used to Louis’ outbursts. “I expect I’ll go back to working in the factory.”_

_“Zayn will move to Tenerife with me,” Louis said. “He doesn’t like the cold either.”_

_“Zayn’s going to finish his uni degree while he works in the book shop, then when he’s graduated he’ll open his own.”_

_Louis glanced over at him, a little surprised. “Is that what he said?”_

_Liam shrugged. “That’s what he wants. I think that’d be nice. Have to try and convince him to come up to Wolverhampton sometimes.”_

_“Well, I’m sure Wolverhampton doesn’t have an overabundance of book shops,” Louis said. “I’m sure Wolverhampton doesn’t have an overabundance of much.”_

_Liam looked like he wasn’t sure whether or not to be offended. “How do you know that?”_

_“I’m a northerner; we just know. Anyway, what I’m saying is that Zayn could just as easily open up his shop in Wolverhampton.”_

_Liam looked doubtful. “He’s not going to do that.”_

_“Aye, well, probably not. But it never hurts to ask.” Louis nudged Liam with his knee. “He’s fond of you, you know.”_

_Liam frowned. “Yeah. He’s fond of you, as well.”_

_Louis opened his mouth to speak, but decided against it. It was quite possibly the first display of discretion in his entire life. “Yeah. Well, I’m extremely charming and likable, you know.”_

_That prompted a grin from Liam. “Who told you that?”_

_Louis knocked his knuckles against Liam’s jaw. “Oi. D’you want a smack?”_

_“My mum raised me to be honest.”_

_“Did she raise you to be a shit?”_

_Liam’s grin widened. “I’ll try and behave.”_

_Louis could have sworn there was a time when Liam wasn’t this cheeky, and gave him a smack anyway, just for good measure._

 

-

 

_“Payne and I lead, you two cover.” Louis’ voice was sharp, rising over the distant blasts of falling shells and, closer, the loud, ragged breathing of the newest member of their squad, a lad that none of them knew very well called Harrington. He was from Barnsley, so he and Louis were nearly neighbours._

_Louis had already called on that to stop the lad from losing his head when he had seen a body missing its legs and arms – his first dead body from close up, Louis gathered._ Us Yorkshire lads can handle anything. Yeah? Good lad _. Looking at him, Louis knew he might have to use it again before the afternoon was out._

_“Go. Now.”_

_He and Liam shot up and were running before the warning_ rat-tat-tat _from the German gun nest began snapping at their heels. Behind them, Harrington and Zayn were returning fire, covering them as best they could. The distance was less than thirty feet, but Louis could almost feel every gap between his racing heartbeats, so much further did it seem._

_It reminded him of their first-ever battle. The high was much different now._

_The moment the two of them were safely behind a crumbling stone wall (had it been a church? Louis hadn’t paid enough attention in school to be able to read the Latin inscription carved into the stone lintel, still legible despite the fact that much of the building it had once belonged to had been reduced to rubble), Louis turned, searching out the other two. The moment he made eye contact with Zayn, he waved them forward, and it was his and Liam’s turn to cover their crossing._

_“We’ll have to make it across to that shop front,” Louis decided grimly, when Zayn and Harrington had come surging into their shelter in a spray of pebbles and the gun had quieted once more, leaving behind a deceiving silence. “That’s the only way we’ll be close enough.”_

_Harrington leaned – nearly fell – back against the wall. His face was white. “We’re to do that again?”_

_Louis glanced over his shoulder and set his jaw. Liam wondered if he had received his battlefield promotion because he had finally learned some leadership skills, or if the skills had come after. Certainly he was much more patient now than Liam would have ever given him credit for when they had met._

_“We have to take out that gun nest or the other lads will never be able to advance,” he said. Leaning his gun against the wall, he reached out and clasped a hand on Harrington’s shoulder. The lad nearly flinched. Louis let out a breath and lowered his voice. “Look. I know it’s frightening, but you mustn’t think about it. Payno here is frightened. I’m frightened. But we’re going to do what we need to do, to keep the other lads safe. Yeah?”_

_“Why doesn’t he go with you, Lou?” Zayn suggested. “Liam and I will go first, and then we can cover you.”_

_Louis glanced back and forth between Zayn and Harrington. “Yeah? Yeah, alright. Go on, then.”_

_Zayn nodded, and he and Liam took off without hesitation. Louis leaned around the corner and began to lay down covering fire, always a little amazed, in the back of his mind, at the way his focus could narrow to whatever lay down the sight of his gun and the sharp smell of gunpowder. He had never so much as fired a gun before the war._

_He caught sight, out of the corner of his eye, of Zayn stumbling, but he could not spare the focus to turn and look until he saw Liam plunge to safety on the other side of their crossing._

_Zayn had gone crashing to the ground, obviously hit but not dead, his body twisting in some semblance of an attempt to crawl to safety. The machine gun started up again as Louis shouted, “Liam! Drag him out!”_

_Liam didn’t need to be told twice. As soon as he noticed that Zayn was no longer behind him, he spun, searching, and then ducked down, running as fast as he could while presenting the smallest target he could manage. He dodged behind scattered bits of rubble, finding as much cover as possible. When he reached Zayn, he fisted one hand in the front of his uniform and, in a feat of nearly superhuman strength, dragged Zayn to his feet and pulled him the last few stumbling steps to the meager cover of a burnt-out car._

_Louis barely had time to exhale in relief before something slammed into his shoulder. He caught himself, lurching back behind his makeshift shelter on instinct alone before he realized that Harrington had gone running past him._

_“Harrington! Get back! Liam – “_

_But it was too late. Even as Liam loaded his rifle to try and provide some cover, Harrington spun and fell in a hail of bullets. Louis swore, fumbling through his pack for his grenades. Out in the open, Harrington moaned, twitching. Louis couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he barely had the time to focus on it anyway._

_“Payne! How’s your throwing arm?”_

_Liam shook his head, looking from Louis and then back over his shoulder at the gun nest, sequestered behind a veritable mountain of sandbags. His gaze slid to Zayn, who was cradling his hand and forearm, eyes closed, breathing shallowly._

_“I can try,” he called. His voice, though no louder than it needed to be, sounded almost ludicrously loud in the aberrant quiet after the guns stopped. “No promises.”_

_Louis’ eyes tracked the distance, too. “You don’t have to make it all the way,” he muttered under his breath._ Just far enough for me to get closer in the chaos that comes after.

_Louis rolled a grenade across the distance between them; Liam’s foot shot out to stop it, and he picked it up and hefted it in his hand. This wasn’t the plan; they had wanted to get close enough to land one directly inside the gun nest. But now they had to make the best play they could before one of them bled out._

_Liam looked across at Louis, who nodded. Suddenly, Liam shot to his feet, spinning even as he pulled the pin, and lobbed the grenade with all of his strength._

_Louis would have to hand it to him later; it was a hell of a throw._

_The grenade landed short, and bounced across the cobbles, coming to a rest against a jut of rock that had once belonged to one of the buildings that made up the square. There was enough time for an intake of breath before it blew, scattering stone and debris across the courtyard. Louis took the opportunity to run like hell, directly past the shop front they had aimed for earlier and toward the spill of rubble from the far end of the row of shops._

_The machine gun started up again, and Louis ducked in behind a tangle of metal and rock. He pulled the pin on his last grenade, remembering years of pick-up footy in the street outside of his house, of having to know the difference between a blind kick and taking the time to take a breath, aim, and make sure he could score._

_So, even though it cost him a very vulnerable couple of seconds, he stepped out into the open, found his target, and lobbed the grenade as accurately as he could manage under the circumstances._

_Then he turned, crouched down, and covered his ears._

_The sound was the loudest, closest explosion he had heard in a while, knocking him forward so hard that he didn’t have time to catch himself; he felt his lip explode open when he hit his face on a wooden supporting beam, miraculously intact despite the steady bombardment of the city for months on end. As he lay on his side, stunned, he felt the blood pooling in the corner of his mouth and then spilling out, running down to catch itself in his ear._

_Coughing, he rolled onto his hands and knees and crawled behind the post, sitting down with his back against it, knowing better than move out into the open until the ringing in his ears had died down and he had had time to assess the situation._

_It was a long moment before he reached up and wiped the blood off of his chin with his sleeve, almost absently._

_From behind him, the machine gun was still quiet. Peering slowly out from behind the post, he could see that the sandbags were intact, but that there didn’t appear to be anyone moving in the nest. The gun itself drifted slightly in the gust of wind that came rattling across the square._

_Louis climbed cautiously to his feet, his heart surging wildly when he saw movement out of the corner of his eye – but it was only Liam, moving toward the nest, too, rifle at the ready._

_Louis waved for his attention, and indicated that Liam should break wide, around the far side of the nest. Louis would approach from this side._

_They reached the mountain of sandbags at almost the same time, Liam slightly ahead. Louis saw his rifle come up and raised his own, knowing what that meant._

_Two of the three soldiers were dead, or at least badly wounded. They did not move, faces bloody and limbs splayed. The last shakily raised his hands, his young face smeared with blood._

_Louis exchanged glances with Liam. And then, just as he was about to lower his rifle, the young man lunged._

_Liam shot him twice._

_Louis leaned his hip against the sandbags, heart racing, suddenly aware of how still it was in the aftermath of so much motion. Everything else suddenly begged to be allowed back into his consciousness._

_“Zayn? Is he – ”_

_“Alive,” Liam said gruffly, turning his back on the carnage in the nest. “Hit once in the hand, twice in the arm. He’s not best pleased but I tied it off. He’ll not bleed out, if we can get a medic soon.”_

_Louis nodded. “Harrington?”_

_Liam shook his head. “Was begging for his mum. He’s quiet now. I don’t think…” He shook his head again._

_Louis swore softly. Almost stiffly, he began making his way back across the hard-won courtyard._

_“You alright?” Liam asked, falling in next to him._

_“Yeah,” Louis replied. “’course.”_

_Liam eyed him. “Your face is fucked up.”_

_Louis almost instinctively reached up with his sleeve to wipe at his chin. “I forgot. It’s okay. Just a split lip.” He reached over and knocked his hand against Liam’s arm, without much force. “Thought you were going to say something smart about how my face is always fucked up.”_

_Liam shook his head. “Not in the mood.”_

_The two lapsed into silence even as, far off, they heard the voices of the rest of their squad approaching._

 

-

 

_Louis saw them first, the line of trucks coming over the hill._

_“It’s the 96 th,” someone said, from further down the line, and that made sense; these were the men they were replacing. _

_It had not occurred to Louis to wonder why the men on their way to the battlefield marched of their own volition, while those being carried back to camp rode on vehicles. He saw why that was soon enough._

_The men on the trucks didn’t call out as they road by, their eyes lowered. Their faces were dirty and bloodied; some nursed wounds that had only been hastily tended. One or two of them smoked, simply going through the motions, their gazes distant._

_Louis made eye contact with only one, and wished he hadn’t._

_“Do we look like that, when we’ve come back from battle?” Liam murmured._

_On his other side, Zayn hushed him._

_Once the trucks had passed and they were able to take to the roadway again, Louis shook his head. “Looks like we’re heading into some madness, lads.”_

_“I heard that they’ve been trying to take Soulier Ridge for two weeks,” Zayn said soberly. “They just keep throwing men at it. They need more aerial support, I think, but it’s hard to draw resources away from other places.”_

_“Oh, good; at least we’ll die for a good reason.” Louis lit a cigarette._

_“Maybe we’ll be the ones who take it,” Liam suggested._

_“As long as we don’t come back looking like we’ve seen the Huns murder our nans and wear their skins as hunting jackets, I’ll be pleased,” Louis replied._

_As they crested the hill and saw the camp laid out below them, and further away, the second hill that hid the battlefield from view, Louis wondered again what they were getting themselves into. They had seen more than a few battles so far, enough for each of them to have been decorated or promoted. But he had not yet seen anything quite like the looks in the eyes of the soldiers they had passed, like they had been all used up from the inside._

_Louis would look back later and wonder if he had had a sense of foreboding. But that wasn’t what it was; the thought that he might have had was just the benefit of hindsight. At the time, he had no inkling at all of what was to come._


	6. And Go to the Grave With the Song Still In Them

_Night, at long last, had fallen. The covering bombardment on both sides had stopped for the time being, and the inky dark sky was deceivingly clear above them. Louis tugged on Zayn’s sleeve and pointed as they neared an impact crater, crouched low. Guns at the ready, they came to the lip to find it mercifully empty._

_Louis vaulted down into the hole, Zayn and Liam following. There was maybe four inches of water in the bottom of the crater, but thankfully no bodies. Louis kicked at some of the earth, creating a sort of ledge that he could wedge his pack onto so that it wouldn’t get wet. He let his weight fall against the wall of the crater next to it, tilting his head back and closing his eyes._

_“Long day,” Liam remarked, squatting down and rummaging through his pack._

_“If we don’t take that fucking ridge tomorrow, I’m going to be convinced that we’ve died and this is hell,” Louis responded. “Every day, us rushing their bunkers, over, and over, forever and ever, Amen.”_

_Zayn lit a cigarette, leaning against the wall, too. “Let’s count our blessings, lads.”_

_Louis cracked an eyelid and glanced over at him. “Right, go on, then.”_

_“My smokes stayed dry,” Zayn offered. “We’ve got our own hole to hunker down in. Who knows? We may even get some sleep.”_

_“Dinner first,” Liam put in, passing Zayn a tin of meat. He tossed one to Louis, who caught it against his chest and indicated that Liam should also throw him a spoon._

_“I’ll tell you one thing,” Louis said, after two or three minutes during which no one spoke, each one intent on his food. “If I die and we don’t take this ridge, I will be personally offended.”_

_“A lot of men have died for it already,” Zayn said soberly._

_There was a moment of slightly abashed silence while they all brooded over this._

_It was Zayn who spoke again. “This morning, when they woke us up with that bombardment the very second the sun was up, Stevenson had barely put his head up over the lip of the foxhole and they shot off his helmet, and then they shot him. It was like… he lived all night for no reason. He survived yesterday and went to sleep and woke up and died right away. I don’t reckon he even said anything this morning. He just woke up and died.”_

_“Aye, we never know, do we?” Louis indicated a small gesture of ‘cheers’ with his nearly-empty can of meat. “If this is the last night for me, I can imagine worse company.”_

_“That won’t happen to us,” Liam said firmly. “We’ve got more sense than that, putting our heads out of foxholes when the Huns are waiting for us to do just that.”_

_“How do you suggest we sort out where to go next, then, if you’re the expert?” Louis retorted. “We can’t wait out the rest of the war in this hole, much as I’d like to. Probably the driest I’ve been in about six days.”_

_“Pack it in,” Zayn said, without heat. “I didn’t mention that to start an argument. I just… I dunno. I’ve seen a lot of men die, since this started. But that one has stayed with me all day.” There was a beat. “It might always.”_

_“Yeah, reminds you of how fast it can happen,” Louis agreed, serious for once. “I’ve got a few of those myself. Going to be waking up in the night for a long time, I expect.”_

_Liam, who regularly woke up in a panic now but would never describe what had frightened him so, did not add to the discussion._

_Louis tossed his can into the pool of muddy water at the center of their shelter. “Either of you lads remember what it was like? Before we came over here?”_

_Zayn nodded slowly._

_Liam glanced from one to the other. Louis could tell, even though he only saw the dimmest outline of his silhouette. “What do you mean?”_

_“I mean, do you remember being sort of… I don’t know. Frightened isn’t the right word. Oxford?”_

_“Uneasy,” Zayn supplied._

_“Thanks. Yeah, uneasy. We all knew the Huns were on the march, didn’t we? First Poland, and Czechoslovakia, and wherever else. And we all just kept hoping it would stop, but it didn’t.”_

_“Couldn’t help but know that eventually you’d be drawn in,” Zayn said slowly, having lit a second cigarette. The glowing tip was their only light. “But… you kind of wanted to be. Because at least that would be doing something, instead of just being uneasy.”_

_“Well, we’re certainly doing something now,” Louis said dryly. “I remember my mum had a proper sob about it when I enlisted. But I think she was a bit relieved, too.”_

_“Did either of your dads fight in the Great War?” Liam asked._

_Louis nodded. “Reckon he did. He was fucking useless, my whole life. Drank loads, used to babble about_ _the war when I had to go and drag him home from down the pub when the owner called my mum to come and get him. Never got much sense of out him, though.”_

_“That’s how my dad came to Britain,” Zayn said. “You know they brought over loads of people from his part of the world to fight in Europe and the Middle East, before they had enough actual British people trained up and ready to go to war.”_

_“Huh.” Louis had not known that._

_“Yeah, you never heard about that bit.” Zayn finished his second cigarette and flicked it away. “He cried, when I enlisted. I don’t think I really understood how bad it was for him, and the kinds of things he’d seen, until that. It was funny, you know… we didn’t grow up terribly religious. We celebrated all the Muslim holidays, of course, and we prayed, and we carried on a lot of the traditions from the old country. But I’d never seen my father pray five times a day until the last few days before I left.”_

_Louis was silent for a moment. “Shit.”_

_“Mine got a deferment, because he worked in a field that was considered vital to the war effort,” Liam said quietly. “I don’t know if he ever forgave himself for not going.”_

_“Sort of feels like it doesn’t matter, does it?” Louis asked. “All of the things they did, and saw, and now we’re at it again. Is there going to be another massive war every couple of decades until we all wipe ourselves out? Is what we’re doing here even going to matter, in twenty-five years?”_

_“Don’t ask yourself questions like that,” Zayn said._

_“Why not?” Louis challenged. “It’s our lives on the line, isn’t it?”_

_“There’s no sense in it,” Zayn replied. “Where’s the sense in taking that ridge? What then? We have to take the ridge beyond it? It’s… a pile of dirt. It’s a non-entity. But if we think about it like that, we’ll never be able to do what we have to do. We have to imagine it in the grand scheme of things. We have to trust in God.”_

_“Whose God?” Louis asked, a mite snarkily._

_“Either,” Zayn said. “Any. Whichever one you trust.”_

_“I don’t think God lives out here,” Louis said. “Sorry.”_

_Zayn shrugged. “S’alright. I can pray enough for all of us.”_

 

-

_The sky was not itself. Louis thought that it had once been white, but dirt rained down so hard and fast that it was impossible to tell now, as one shell fell after another. They were coming down close enough that each concussive blast nearly knocked him off of his feet, and it was all he could do to keep straight, making a beeline for the relative safety of the bunker._

_The warning whistle was all he got before the wave of sound and shrapnel took him off his feet. He landed so hard on his back that he couldn’t breathe, and the sky was the wrong colour, and he couldn’t tell if he was facing up or down. He would register individual pain points later, but for now all he felt was shock and confusion, unable to do much more than twist and writhe in the muck._

_Somehow, he found it in him to roll onto one knee, ears still ringing. He thought he heard his name from far away, but he couldn’t be sure. His mother wasn’t here, was she? Who else knew his name, who would be –_

_This was what he remembered later: The iron grip of someone’s fingers on his arm, and a hard jerk that propelled him to his feet and got him started moving. He would make his way, somehow, blindly, unable to sense anything, to the relative safety of a mountain of earth that might once have been a hillock or an attempt at a roughly-hewn bunker._

_When he collapsed on the far side, he could dimly hear the cries of someone calling for a medic, and he struggled to draw the air in that he would need to shout it, too. It never came, but it didn’t matter; in his agony, it seemed like an indeterminate amount of time later when someone’s hands were on him, coaxing a strangled cry out of him as they examined his wound._

_“Stretcher!” Louis didn’t recognize the voice, but the sting of the morphine in his arm reassured him anyway._

_The faces above him, that hastily loaded him into the stretcher and lifted him, were faces he knew well. He was grateful that they lived, and that they were here with him now. He tried to tell them that, but he couldn’t seem to make any sound that was unassociated with his pain._

_There was the heavy, deadened impact sound of a bullet somewhere near his head, and the stretcher dropped, sending him tumbling into the mud. He landed so hard on his damaged side that he blacked out for a moment. He awoke to the same torment moments later, sobbing into the mud, tasting it in between his teeth but unable to right himself or to find a way to move that didn’t send pain lancing through him._

_This time, when someone lifted him, it wasn’t on a stretcher; he was slung over someone’s shoulder and carried to safety, around gaping wounds in the earth, crying men and dead ones, men who still fired their weapons and advanced as they had been instructed to do despite the hell all around them. Every step was a lightning-stroke of pain, and eventually Louis was nearly delirious with it, not sure if it was real or not when the sounds of the fighting dimmed a little and someone without blood on their face leaned over him, checking his wound._

__He couldn’t seem to get his wits about him as late as the next day, when he lay, dazed and aching, in a_ _ _medic’s tent. His hip was nearly unbearable, but he couldn’t seem to move into a more comfortable position._

_No one came to see him until the third or fourth day, when he was lucid again and his side, hip, and leg were tightly bandaged, damaged almost beyond recognition by shrapnel. It was then that he turned his head to the side and saw Liam sitting next to him, cap twisted in his hands._

_“Liam.” He could hear the relief in his own voice._

_“Zayn’s dead.” Liam’s knuckles were white. He did not look at Louis._

_Louis felt his heart sputter out under his ribs. “What?”_

_He remembered the hand on his arm, the one that had sent him hurtling in the right direction. The thought made him cold._

_“Yeah.” Liam stood up. “Thought you should know.”_

_He walked out of the tent, and Louis didn’t stop him. It was the last time they saw each other for a long time._

 

-

 

_Louis had never been a patient man. Though it had only been three weeks since his injury, he was itching to be out of his bandages, to get rid of the visible markings of weakness. The front-line surgeon had done his best, and then Louis had been operated on again behind the lines, a day or two later – he couldn’t recall exactly when, as they had dosed him with an admirable quantity of painkillers._

_Some of the shrapnel remained. Louis knew that they had been unable to remove it, lest they cause more damage than they would by leaving it where it was. His skin was having a hard time closing over around it, and he still tore through stitches and bled when he moved too much. The nurses had had it with him, but he could not sit still._

_He was waiting now in a small, private section of a smaller tent – well, as private as a tent could be. He could hear the hubbub all around him, much less agonized in tone than the tent in which his initial surgery had been done, fresh from the battlefield. If he half-closed his eyes, he could almost imagine himself in a doctor’s office back home._

 

_“Tomlinson? Louis.” The doctor barely glanced up as he entered through a flap in the side, focused on a sheaf of papers attached to a clipboard._

_“Yes, sir.” Louis was standing, arms clasped loosely behind his back; he nearly subconsciously straightened his shoulders._

_The doctor did glance up then, briefly. “You can sit down.”_

_Though it ached to stand, sending dull bolts of pain up his back and side and making him shift his weight as subtly as possible in order to favour the other hip, sitting would be far, far worse. Louis shook his head. “I’ve been in bed for a while, sir. I would prefer to stand, if it’s all the same to you.”_

_The doctor cast a beady eye over him that suggested to Louis that perhaps he saw through the ruse. “Very well, then. You have put in a request to return to your battalion. Is that right?”_

_Louis nodded. “Yes, sir. I know it will be another – week or so, perhaps, before the stitches have finished healing and I can move freely, without bandages. But I assumed that the paperwork would take some time.”_

_The doctor frowned. “Yes, that’s not – well. I will have to do an assessment, at any rate. I see that you can stand with little difficulty. I’d like to see you walk.”_

_Louis had readied himself for this. He turned, as casually as possible, away from the doctor, so that he would not be able to see his face. And then he made his way, still casually, across the tent – slowly, he thought, but with every ounce of willpower forcing himself not to limp._

_When he turned, the doctor was tapping his finger thoughtfully against the chart. “Would you walk with me?” he asked._

 

_Louis had not expected that._

_“Walk – with you?”_

_“Yes – I have a round to do, and since I have a few more questions for you, I thought you might accompany me.”_

_Louis’ whole body protested at the idea. But he bit it back and smiled. “Yeah, of course.”_

_The doctor was unsmiling. He stepped back, holding back the tent flap. “After you.”_

_By the time they reached the tent the doctor had indicated to him, it was over. Louis’ face was white, and he didn’t care about how it would look when he wrapped his fingers around one of the supporting poles and leaned, forehead touching the cool metal. It was one thing, having to walk across the firm, well-tramped-down soil in the tent. But the mud was something else, sucking at every step, pulling his howling hip out of alignment until he could barely see._

_The doctor gave him an almost fatherly clasp on the shoulder. “I saw your chart and assumed you would be invalided home,” he said._

_Louis’ teeth were gritted. “Then why did you put me through this?” He was furious, mostly with himself_ – _mostly with his body, for failing at this simplest of tasks._

_“Because I think you needed to see that there was no way we could possibly send you back out there.” The doctor released his shoulder. “You’ve done all you can. There’s no shame in this.”_

_“Please,” Louis said, and he didn’t even care about the pleading note in his voice. “Give me a few more days – a week. I’ll be able to do it by then. I’ll be recovered.”_

_“No, lad. Trust me, the army would keep you if they could. They’re sending men back out that they have no business sending back out. But you can barely walk. You would hold your unit back, put other men in danger. I’m doing this to save your life, and theirs. You need to go home.”_

_Louis could have cried. He turned, took a few steps away from the doctor without looking at him, and then the mud caught at him wrong and he went down, violently, on one knee. It jarred him so badly that he could not prevent himself from landing on his elbows in the muck._

_It felt like it might be the worst moment of his life._

_He heard the doctor requesting assistance, even as he struggled onto his hands, and tried to push himself upright. Twice he failed before warm hands caught him under his elbows and lifted him to his feet._

_“Aye, lad, there you go, arm around me now,” said a quiet, kindly voice, and Louis did as he was told and allowed himself to be taken back to his bedside._

 

_The nurse tutted at him as she wiped the mud from him, getting him changed into clean clothes. She moved with brisk efficiency, but she took care with his injured side. The gentleness of her hands was the last straw, and Louis felt the tears well up even as she helped him onto his back. She generously pretended not to notice, undoubtedly doing her duty as she had hundreds of times before, and left him to his own devices._

_Louis turned his face to the side and closed his eyes, letting the tears soak his pillow and bury themselves in his hair._

 

-

 

Harry rocks back on his heels, stunned. After a moment, he stands up, gathering the typewritten pages neatly into a stack that he puts on the corner of Louis’ desk, too distracted to make a note of the obvious fact that Louis, should he enter the study, will immediately see and know that he has read them.

 

He turns about in the middle of the room, casting an eye over the other fragments of paper strewn across every surface. How much of this is the sequel that Louis had said he wasn’t writing?

 

He collects up a fresh handful of sheets, skimming them. Then he stops, returns to the top, and reads more closely.

_I’m sorry that I haven’t been the same. I don’t think either of us are the same._

 

The handwriting is careful, not the neat script of someone educated. It has been painstakingly etched by someone whose pain eases out of his every pore.

 

_I miss him all the time. I miss you, too. It feels like I lost both of you that day._

 

Harry quickly sets the letter down, feeling as though he has come too close to brushing against an open wound.

 

“What are you doing?”

 

The sound of Louis’ voice nearly makes Harry jump out of his skin. He spins around quickly, knowing already that he looks guilty.

 

Louis stands in the doorway, one hand on the frame the way he does sometimes, when his hip is bothering him but he is refusing to use the cane that Harry knows he owns. Louis’ eyes flick down once, very briefly, to where Harry’s hands have moved too late from the letters.

 

“I said, what are you doing?”

 

Harry grasps at straws. “Tidying,” he says, which isn’t a lie. “I thought, if your workspace were a bit – you know, neater, you may be more inclined to – ”

 

“You’ve been going through my things.” It isn’t a question.

 

Harry shakes his head. “No, I was just trying to organize them a bit. Honestly, it was not my intention to snoop.”

 

Louis’ eyebrows rise. “And the part where I asked you not to come into my study? Did you miss that or are you being intentionally obtuse?”

 

“I’m sorry,” Harry says. “I know I’ve betrayed your trust. I just – ”

 

“Meant well,” Louis cuts him off. “Yeah, don’t you always?”

 

He comes into the room, sweeping the papers up off the corner of the desk. When he approaches Harry, the latter steps back, but Louis has another goal. He picks up the letters that Harry had been reading and bundles them with the others.

 

Making his way to the fireplace, he painfully lowers himself onto one knee and begins stoking the embers of the fire that Harry lit earlier. Harry only realizes his intent once the flames have flickered to life and Louis picks up the bundle of papers.

 

Harry reaches out, speaking before he even realizes what words he wants to form. “No, don’t – please.”

 

Louis turns around. “No? Why not? Should I leave them lying around so that you can lie to me and go through them again?” He sounds surprisingly bitter.

 

“Please, Louis. Those are your – letters. You can lock them away; I won’t look at them again.” Harry knows that Louis will burn the letters to spite him, and he doesn’t want to be the reason why Louis regrets this later. Because Harry is fairly confident that Louis will regret this; he has obviously held onto these things for a reason.

 

“I should have burnt them a long time ago,” Louis says, and his hands tremble slightly. Harry can’t read the expression in his voice. “You go off to war and it – you don’t realize that it doesn’t let you go. It never lets you go.”

 

He tosses the sheaf of papers into the fire before Harry can stop him. He can’t bear the look on Louis’ face as the light from the flames dances over it, so he looks away as the fire crackles and snaps, devouring every shred of Louis’ mementos.

 

 


	7. We Forgot That We Were Men

Harry doesn’t see Louis at all the following day. When he hears him stumping along the hall floor upstairs, his limp audible (Harry doesn’t have to draw back the curtains to know that it is raining, and so Louis is suffering more than usual), Harry makes himself scarce, leaving Louis to his own devices in the kitchen for as long as it takes the latter to make a sandwich and bring it back upstairs with him.

 

Louis had not asked him to leave. That is the one thing that Harry holds onto. Maybe they aren’t friends, exactly, but Harry has betrayed his trust nonetheless, and if Louis hasn’t asked him to go, then maybe there is still something he can do to repair it.

 

At a bit of loose ends, Harry tidies the front room. Opening a cabinet, he finds a whole host of loose papers, and had he not cast an eye on the top one and noticed that it was a bill, he would not have looked any more closely at them, too wary of being burned again by going through Louis’ things.

 

Sifting through the bills, Harry frowns. Many of them are dated recently, and they read things like ‘For Your Urgent Attention’ and ‘Final Notice’ across the top. Harry knows from his own involvement that Louis had received a decent sum for the writing of his novel, and that he had made a not-insignificant amount off of the royalties. He wonders where the money has gone, or if Louis has simply fallen behind on payments. He is not terribly organized; Harry could see how it would happen.

 

Setting the bills aside – he fully intends to organize them according to heat, electricity, water, council tax, and telephone later – he digs a little deeper into the cabinet. He knows that he shouldn’t, that he should have learned his lesson, but Louis has not specifically warned him away from looking in here. In any case, perhaps there is some kind of records of Louis’ accounts, or a chequebook, or something else that Harry can use to make sense of Louis’ financial situation. He could, he supposes, always ask him directly, but something tells him that that would be yet another topic of conversation that Louis is not interested in pursuing.

 

At the back of the cabinet is a faded velvet box. Harry’s brow knits, and he reaches for it almost before he realizes that he is doing it. It is the kind of box that one keeps jewelry in, but Harry can’t imagine that Louis owns any.

 

Opening the box releases a little puff of dust. There, held in place by a band of purple and white ribbon, lies a silver cross.

 

Harry turns it over. It has been lying in its velvet bed for so long that its absence leaves behind a shape in the dust.

 

_Corporal Louis Tomlinson_

_February 12 th, 1943_

 

Harry remembers suddenly something that he read in passing once, when the novel was first published and newspapers were running stories about its success. Louis had been awarded a medal during the war, but as far as Harry can remember, no one was ever clear on what for. Certainly, whatever it is doesn’t seem to be something that Louis is proud of; he seems to have put it into the cabinet on the day he received it and never taken it out again.

 

Harry carefully puts it back in its place, closing the box and returning it to its shelf.

 

Glancing up at the ceiling above, he gives a nigh-imperceptible shake of his head. Why does Louis keep so many secrets?

 

-

 

_The farm was once a small, family-owned operation; it reminded Louis of his grandparents’ place in North Yorkshire. The house was two stories but narrow, and painted white. The barn that stood not far away looked to be in good condition from one angle, but when they came around the other side, they could see that it had been looted and burned, things of little or no value to the looters spread across the yard and half-buried in snow._

_Despite how deserted it was, Louis had a hunch that not all was at it seemed. The birds that had squawked merrily at them for much of their march had gone silent, and Louis could see that logs had been taken from the woodpile since the last snowfall, not quite two nights ago._

_Louis leaned over and, when he knew he was in Liam’s eyeline, circled his hand in the signal for approach with caution. Liam nodded, indicating that some of the men should follow him around to where the woods nearly reached the house. Louis waited with the rest, huddled low in the trees, watching the house across the open field for any sign of movement._

 

_Louis heard the sound of someone’s safety come off, and his head whipped around at once, searching._

_“I saw the curtains twitch,” Rogers murmured._

_“Hold your fire,” Louis hissed. “Not yet. Wait until I give the order.”_

_It was another interminable ninety seconds before Louis received the signal down the line that Liam was in position._

_“Alright, lads.” Louis raised his gun, adjusting his position. “All the front windows. Let’s take ‘em out.”_

_The shots that rang out shattered the stillness, spilling glass over the window ledges and onto the snow. There was returning fire almost at once, but the shots were wild and far between; Louis suspected two soldiers, maybe three._

_While the men inside of the house were distracted, Liam’s men made their way in through the back entrance. The sound of shouts and the sudden lack of returning fire told Louis that they had accomplished their goal, and when he heard Liam shout the all-clear, he waved his men forward and across the field._

_When they entered the house, Louis saw that he had not been entirely correct. A group of men stood around the base of the stairs, guns up and ready, looking up at the landing. Liam and another man, Wiltower, had gone up to the first landing and were waiting, out of view from the top of the stairs._

_“There were three of them,” Zayn said. “One of them is dead. The other two are upstairs.”_

_Liam’s face was grim. “Surrender!” He called up the stairs from the landing. “There’s no way down.”_

_There was a long silence, and then the click of a door opening. The men hefted their weapons, waiting._

 

_And then there was the strange sound of something bouncing, not quite footsteps – and it was Zayn who figured it out first._

_“_ Grenade _.”_

_Louis dropped his gun, grabbed the backs of the shirts of the two nearest men, and jerked them back out onto the porch. They stumbled, and Louis lost his balance, tumbling down into the snow. He huddled, waiting for the explosion._

1…2…3…

_But it never came. After fifteen long seconds, Louis climbed onto his knees and crawled back onto the porch, retrieving his gun as he sat down against the front door frame and listened._

_There was only silence within._

 

_Slowly, as silently as he could, Louis crawled into the house, back toward the stairs. He could see the shapes of some of his men huddled in the dim light, arms over their heads. Looking up the stairs, he froze when he saw the shape of the grenade on the fourth step from the bottom._

_Past that, Liam and Wiltower were frozen, each second that ticked by forcing them to ask why they weren’t dead already._

_He heard someone stir behind him, and glanced back over his shoulder. Zayn’s eyes were wide, and he slowly shook his head._ Don’t.

_Louis focused again on the grenade. Then, ignoring Zayn’s advice, he rose to his feet and, gingerly, stepped onto the first step._

_There was not a sound from upstairs. Even the two soldiers on the landing moved not a muscle._

_Louis only noticed that his hands were trembling when he was reaching out, and he nearly closed his eyes. The only thing that stopped him was that, if this moment were to be his last, closing his eyes wouldn’t prevent a damned thing._

_When he picked up the grenade, it was cool to the touch. The pin had certainly been pulled; the only thing Louis could imagine was that it was a dud. Once his fingers were closed around it, it was as though time caught up with him and he turned and ran, out of the house and into the yard. He wound his arm back and lobbed the grenade as hard as he could; it spiralled through the air, dark against the white sky, and fell into the snow just beyond the tree line._

_Only then did oxygen come slamming into his lungs, and he realized that he had been holding his breath. Sinking to his knees in the snow, he tried to catch up, breathing in and out shallowly until the sound of men’s voices behind him drove him back to his feet, stumbling back toward the house._

_Liam’s men were already halfway up the stairs by the time Louis reached the front door, and he did not stop them. Liam and Wiltower had already disappeared up above. There were heavy thuds upstairs, and Louis could imagine the falling of their boots, the splintering of a door as it was forced inwards._

 

_A single shot was fired._

_Then the sound of footfalls began again, and this time Louis forced himself to move, making his way up the stairs with Zayn on his heels._

_When he reached the first bedroom, he saw that one of the soldiers was dead, blood and other things sprayed across the wall and window sill. The other one was trembling, sitting in the corner with his hands up, his comrade’s blood dotting his face._

_“Liam, don’t – ” Zayn began, and of course he had recognized Liam’s intent before anyone else._

_When Liam shot him, the young soldier’s head thudded back against the wall. He was immediately still._

_“Liam, he surrendered,” Louis hissed, grabbing Liam’s arm and jerking him around to look at him._

_Liam’s eyes were flat. “They tried to kill all of us. We gave them a chance to surrender. They decided not to.”_

_“It was a dud,” Louis snapped. “For fuck’s sake, mate. No one’s been hurt.”_

_“He didn’t know it was a dud when he threw it,” Liam pointed out._

_Louis’ voice sharpened. “There are rules. That’s the only way we stay human in this – by following the rules.”_

_Liam abruptly pushed past Louis, leaving the room and heading down the stairs._

_Louis heard Zayn let out a slow breath. “That wasn’t right.”_

_Louis wasn’t sure if Zayn was referring to what Liam had done or to what Louis had said, but he nodded anyway. “I know.”_

_Zayn was still for another moment, then he turned. “I’m going to find him.”_

_Louis didn’t reply._

 

-

 

Louis doesn’t speak to Harry for nearly three days after the burning of the papers. Harry desperately needs to go into town, both because there is only so much work he can do over the phone from here, and because he needs to pick up groceries, but he is half-worried that Louis will not let him back into the house.

 

Eventually, he decides that he cannot delay any longer. Making his way up the stairs, he finds – as he has found every morning for the last three – Louis’ breakfast and tea sitting cold on the landing where Harry left it. He had been cooking Louis’ meals as a bit of an apology, and Louis had apparently not accepted just yet. Stepping over it, Harry goes to Louis’ bedroom door and knocks.

 

He had to knock once more before there is a scuffling sound and he can hear Louis curse, cross. When the door swings open, the latter is clearly very drunk.

 

“Fuck’s sake, Harry.” Louis’ eyes are red; it looks like he hasn’t slept, and he sways a little in the doorway. “Do you not have a life of your own, somewhere? I know you have an office; you’ve called me from it about six thousand times in the past few months.”

 

Harry frowns. “Louis, I’m sorry. I should not have gone through your things. I have been trying to make it up to you.”

 

Louis glances down at the tray of congealing oatmeal with barely concealed disgust. “Yes, I’ve seen that. Has it occurred to you that I don’t want or need anything made up to me?”

 

“I know, but – ”

 

“Harry, a man doesn’t move to an isolated house miles out of town because he wants to entertain every night.” Louis is losing his patience, and it is audible. “Do you understand that? I want to be left alone.”

 

Louis starts to close the door, but Harry braces a hand on the wood and stops him. He is not sure where the words or even the sentiment come from, but he has grown tired of coming up against walls. Harry is patient, but he is not endlessly so. “Alone, is it? So you can drink yourself to death in peace?”

 

Louis’ voice is cold as he regards Harry with an expression that suggests that he knows that Harry wants to argue, and he is perfectly willing to oblige him. “Am I not entitled?”

 

“No. You’re not.” Harry doesn’t know what’s gotten into him, honestly, but he can’t stop. “I’m not going to pretend that I didn’t see those letters from your family, from your friend. There are people who miss you.”

 

“You don’t know a thing about me, love.” Louis’ tone is dangerous. “You’d best take a step back right now.”

 

Harry takes his hand off the door. “Fine. But let me apologize for what I did.”

 

“No.” Louis closes it, and Harry hears him draw the latch.

 

Frustrated, Harry slaps his palm against the wood. There is no response in the room beyond.

 

Harry makes up his mind to go into town anyway. He figures that Louis is so drunk that he won’t be around to put up much resistance to Harry’s entrance when he gets back.

 

-

 

As it turns out, Louis does not put up any resistance to Harry’s return. In fact, the house is deathly quiet, to the point where it gives Harry a sense of foreboding.

 

Making his way to the kitchen, he unpacks his groceries and organizes the few things he’s picked up from work, all the while with one ear cocked. When everything is all tidied away and he’s still heard nothing – even though this is not uncommon for Louis – he cautiously makes his way to the bottom of the stairs.

 

“Louis?”

 

There is no answer.

 

Harry mounts the stairs very slowly, eyes on the ceiling above, as though that will give him some indication of Louis’ presence.

 

“Louis, I’ve gone to the shop, so I can make pasta or a roast tonight, if you’ve a preference…”

 

He has the cold, alien impression in the pit of his stomach, not that no one is listening, but that no one can _hear_ him.

 

He quickens his step as he reaches the top of the stair, and that is when he sees the dim shape huddled on the hall carpet, unmoving.

 

“ _Louis._ ”

 

Harry is by his side in an instant, clocking the sticky-sweet smell of spilled liquor and the underlying sourness of vomit. He turns Louis onto his side, and this is what prompts the latter to stir, moaning.

 

“Are you hurt?” Harry asks him. “What’s happened?”

 

Louis’ leg twitches a little, as if he wants to curl in on himself, but he can’t quite manage it with his war injury. His voice is a soft slur in the darkness of the hallway. “Fell… fuck, hurts.”

 

“Yes,” Harry says grimly. “I expect it does. I’m going to – help you sit up.”

 

Though he has not the faintest clue of how to do this without hurting Louis more, the latter does not offer any resistance at all as Harry loops an arm around him and drags him into a seated position, propping him up against the wall. Louis does not open his eyes.

 

“Don’t feel well,” he murmurs, and his chest hitches, but he must have gotten it all out of his system because nothing comes up.

 

“I imagine that’s true,” Harry says, surveying the mess. He will have to come back for this. His first priority is to put Louis to bed before he can do any more damage to himself or to the hall carpet. “Right, I’m taking you to your bedroom. Can you walk, if I help you?”

 

There was a silence as Louis processed this. “If you help me,” he repeated, and Harry wasn’t sure if it was an answer or if Louis was simply parroting back whatever his booze-soaked brain had just heard, but he would take it.

 

“Up you get.” He crouched down, pulling Louis’ arm around his shoulder and wrapping his own around Louis’ waist, gritting his teeth as he hauled Louis’ mostly-dead weight upright. Louis stood on his feet, but he was wobbly, much of his weight resting on Harry. As he straightened, his face contorted.

 

“Hurts.”

 

“You probably fell on your hip,” Harry says, beginning the slow journey toward Louis’ bedroom. The reek of vomit is almost intolerable; Harry will have to change his shirt and clean him up before he puts him to bed. “I’ll fetch you some ice for it once we’ve got you lying down.”

 

Nudging open Louis’ bedroom door with his shoulder, Harry guides him inside and gets him sitting on the edge of the bed. “Don’t lie down,” he says firmly. “I’m going to get you another shirt.”

 

Louis obeys, eyes still closed, swaying a little, as Harry retrieves the top-most folded shirt from the absurd pile that has begun again, in the wake of Harry putting all of his clothes away before.

 

“Arms up,” Harry says, and he carefully peels Louis’ shirt off of him. Wadding it up, he tosses it into the hamper as he hurries down to the bathroom to fetch a wet cloth. When he returns, Louis is precisely where he left him. Harry wipes his face and chest, then pulls the fresh shirt on over his head.

 

“Now you can lie down,” he says. “But – under the covers. There you are.”

 

He pulls the covers up over Louis, who has begun to shiver.

 

“I’ll fetch you some ice,” Harry tells him again. “And some water, for when you wake up. And I’ll tidy the mess in the hall.”

 

Louis makes a noise that sounds like a grunt. Then: “I dreamed that… Liam was here.”

 

Harry stops. “You did?”

 

Louis turns his head, pressing his face into the pillow. “Thought you were him, for a minute. Doesn’t matter.”

 

“Who is he?” Harry asks, not because he doesn’t recognize the name, but because it matters who he is to Louis.

 

“Don’t be stupid. You saw his picture. Read his – read his letters. Liam Payne… carried me out. Carried me out on the day I couldn’t walk.”

 

Harry thinks about what he read that day in Louis’ study, about Louis’ last battle and the injury that had ended his war. There had been no mention of it being Liam who had bundled Louis to safety. “Why did you think I was him?”

 

Louis doesn’t have a response to that, not immediately. He seems like he might be asleep, until he says, “The type to see you home safe, that one. Always saw you home safe.”

 

Harry takes a slow breath. “He writes you letters.”

 

“Wrote,” Louis mumbles. “Not in years. Not anymore.”

 

Harry hesitates another moment. Then he turns and makes his way slowly downstairs, wrapping ice from the icebox in a towel and returning upstairs with it.

 

“Louis,” he says, from the doorway. “Did you ever answer any of his letters?”

 

But Louis doesn’t stir, his breathing deep and even, still shivering but less so now. Harry approaches the bed, pushing the blanket back so he can press the ice against Louis’ hip. He sighs in his sleep, and Harry sits there for a long time with him, watching Louis travel through that deep sleep that he had probably been aiming for when he had overshot the mark and ended up in trouble in the hall.

 

There are never any answers, with Louis, Harry thinks. There are only ever more questions.

 

-

 

The next day, Harry is working as quietly as he can in the front hall. He can hear Louis moving slowly about upstairs interwoven with long periods of silence, but he cannot imagine that Louis would be particularly interested in his presence at the moment, given that he is nursing what Harry knows to be an absolutely dreadful hangover.

 

Harry is only working in the hall because that is where the telephone was installed, when Louis first became a rather famous novelist. Harry is fairly certain that he himself is the only one who has ever used it; certainly it has never rung during his stay in the house, and there was a thick layer of dust gathered in the fingertip-holes of the rotary dial when he had first approached it.

 

He has been finding it rather easy to get things done at Louis’ place, actually. While he is sure that unread manuscripts are piling up at his office – he has stopped there once or twice and studiously avoided the stack in his in-tray – it is nice to be able to focus on the mundane, smaller things that often get ignored in his day-to-day. He does miss human interaction, a little – his part-time assistant, Miss Rosen, and Thomas who sells the newspapers on the corner near his office, and the cheery women in the bakery where he used to work and still visits sometimes – but he finds himself being very, very productive.

 

As he hangs up on the head office bloke in London, he drums his finger on the edge of the hall table. Something has been bothering him about those letters that Louis had burned, ever since it happened. Some of them, certainly, had been from his mother, but not most. That other hand, the tidy but painstaking writing, belonged to someone else. _Liam Payne._

 

Picking up the receiver, Harry dials the operator. When she answers, he thinks for a moment and then says, “Can you put me through to Liam Payne? Wolverhampton?”

 

He does not know for sure that Liam Payne lives, or has ever lived, in Wolverhampton. But he does remember the origins of the character in Louis’ book, and he thinks that it is perhaps worth a try.

 

There is a rather long waiting period during which he is transferred. But, eventually, the line on the other end begins to ring. And ring.

 

The voice that answers is someone lower and gruffer than Harry had anticipated. “Hello?”

 

Harry’s grip tightens on the receiver. “Is this Liam Payne?”

 

There is a brief, considering silence. “Are you selling something?”

 

“I’m not, no,” Harry says.

 

“Then yes. This is Liam Payne. Is there anything I can help you with?”

 

“I don’t know,” Harry says. “I’m not sure… this is silly, but I’m not sure I was expecting you to – ” _Be real? Be alive?_ “…pick up,” he finishes.

 

“Rather odd to call someone thinking that they likely won’t pick up,” Liam says, but he does not sound annoyed. Rather, Harry thinks, he sounds like someone who spends much of his time being genuinely easy to get on with.

 

“I know,” Harry says.

 

“Are you a journalist?” Liam asks. “I haven’t had a journalist in a while, actually. You’d be the first since… oh, I don’t know. A year or two back.”

 

Harry is surprised by this information. “You used to have journalists call? Why?”

 

Liam does not seem at all bothered by the fact that he is having a completely random conversation with a total stranger. “Not loads. Just the ones who did a bit of digging, I suppose. A friend of mine wrote a book that became rather popular.”

 

“Ah,” Harry says. “Actually – I’m Harry Styles. I was the one who picked up his book, for publication.”

 

“Oh?” Oddly, now that they have been introduced, Liam sounds very slightly like he is retreating. “I’m afraid I haven’t got anything – to add. Anything new to say.”

 

“That’s not why I’m calling,” Harry says.

 

“Then… is everything alright?”

 

“It’s just that… I know you’ve written him letters.” Harry wishes he had thought this conversation through a little more before he had so impulsively picked up the phone.

 

“Yes.” Liam sounds properly guarded now.

 

“And that he’s never written you back,” Harry goes on. “At least, that I know of.”

 

“Is there something you need from me?” Liam asks.

 

“No,” Harry says. “Not really. I only thought – he’s a bit lonely. I’ve tried being a friend to him, but he’s difficult.”

 

“He’s always been that way,” Liam replies. “He was difficult from the day I met him. That’s why I haven’t taken offense to him not answering any of my post, but if you’re calling on his behalf for some reason to – ”

 

“No,” Harry cuts in. “I’m not; of course I’m not. I’m calling from his house, but he hasn’t asked me to.”

 

“You’re calling from - ? He’s got a phone?”

 

“Yes,” Harry says. “They installed it – mostly at my urging, admittedly – when he was first published. I wanted an easy way to get a hold of him. It’s a bit of a trek, from the city to where he lives.”

 

“Yeah, it is,” Liam says, and he sounds slightly annoyed now. “I’ve tried calling him, through the directory. I never get through."

 

“When I arrived, it was unplugged from the wall,” Harry admits.

 

“That little shit.” Liam does not sound like he means it affectionately. “Where is he? Can I talk to him?”

 

“He’s not well,” Harry says, which is not entirely untrue.

 

“Is that why you’re there?” Liam asks. “Is he – is it bad?”

 

“No,” Harry says quickly. “I’m here because I want him to start working on his second novel. The sequel, you know, to that one that journalists used to call you about. I thought that he hadn’t started it, but…”

 

“He’s writing a sequel?” Liam sounds positively cold now. “He’s writing _another_ \- ? No. I’m coming up there.”

 

“You don’t want him to write a sequel?” Harry asks, having completely lost the thread of this now.

 

“I didn’t want him to write the first one,” Liam snaps. “And I especially don’t want him to write a sequel, now, after all of his – after everything. If he won’t answer my letters, I’m coming up there. This is his own fault.”

 

“I rather don’t think – ” Harry begins, alarmed.

 

“Thank you for calling, Harry Styles. It was a pleasure.” The line goes dead.

 

Harry holds the receiver to his ear for another few seconds before slowly lowering it back onto the cradle. He is not entirely sure what to do now. Unless he has misread Louis completely, the avoiding of the letters wasn’t an indication that he wanted to remain on speaking terms with Liam. And Liam certainly did not sound like he was coming here with the intention of making amends.

 

Harry wonders if he should forewarn Louis that Liam is coming. His initial thought is no, but it is rooted in cowardice, and he recognizes it right away. He will have to tell him.


	8. If the Sky Comes Falling Down For You

Harry leaves it until the following day. He knows that Louis spent the day after his fall recovering from his hangover by drinking, so he is unlikely to feel much less hungover today, but Harry keeps bringing him food and ice for his hip and Louis, though he has not addressed Harry directly since the fall, has not tried to get rid of him, either.

 

When he brings up Louis’ breakfast – just before noon, of course; Harry doesn’t have a death wish – he finds that Louis is already awake, sitting in a chair by the window. Harry knows that he must have dragged it from another room, since it wasn’t there last night. Tucked under the edge of the chair is the typewriter, which surprises Harry the most; he hadn’t heard Louis go downstairs to fetch that, either.

 

“Leave it on the table,” Louis says, without turning around. Then, a beat later: “Thank you.”

 

Harry does as he is told, but he does not leave the room afterward. “Have you been writing?”

 

“Some,” Louis says.

 

Harry steps over and sits down carefully on the edge of the bed. “Can I read it?”

 

“I burnt it,” Louis replies. “Sometimes I write things down because I’m tired of them clattering around in my head, not because it needs to be read by anyone.”

 

Harry absorbs this in silence.

 

“Do you need anything?” Louis asks. “I’d like to be left alone.”

 

“I have something to tell you,” Harry says.

 

Louis at last glances over at him. He looks tired; there are dark circles under his eyes, and his face is pale. It makes his eyes look startlingly blue. “What’s that?”

 

Harry considers, briefly, how best to say this. “I think we might expect a visitor.”

 

One of Louis’ eyebrows rises. “You’ve made yourself comfortable, haven’t you? And who are you inviting into my house?”

 

“I didn’t invite him, precisely,” Harry says. “It’s just that I spoke to Liam Payne on the phone earlier. Yesterday.”

 

Louis is very still in the chair, still watching Harry, sitting in that way he has as if he is holding himself at a particular angle, a particular stacking of his muscle and bones, to minimize the ache in his hip that is always there. “How did you manage that?”

 

“The way you call anyone,” Harry says. “I just thought – you mentioned him the other night, after your… fall.”

 

“I mentioned him while I was off my face so you thought you’d give him a ring.” Louis sounds disbelieving. Now that he has put it like that, Harry doesn’t quite blame him.

 

“I half didn’t even expect him to pick up,” Harry says. “I don’t know, I just thought… you spend a lot of time here, on your own. And he wrote to you, I know that.”

 

“If I’m not mistaken, we’ve discussed this,” Louis says. “One doesn’t buy a house fifty miles from anywhere because he wants to entertain. I _like_ being alone.”

 

“I don’t know if that’s true,” Harry says, out before he can even stop it.

 

Louis’ eyebrows shoot up. Harry forges ahead. “You haven’t sent me away yet.”

 

“If you’re going to start inviting people over, that may change, pet.” Louis struggles to his feet. “When he comes, I don’t want to see him. Do you understand? No matter what he says. I know you’ve got that bleeding heart of yours, but I will not be best pleased if you go around me on this.”

 

“Alright,” Harry says, feeling a bit wrong-footed.

 

“Don’t give me that look.” Louis glowers at him. “You appointed yourself my cook, housemaid, and butler when you moved in here – without my express permission, by the way. You find some way to mention every day that I should be writing, since you’ve got me contractually obligated to write a sequel, but you’ve somehow failed to notice that I barely get dressed most mornings.” He reaches out, finds the windowsill with one hand. “You can tell Liam for me that I don’t want to see him, and if you don’t want to do that, then you can get out of my house.”

 

Harry sighs very quietly. “I will tell him,” he says. “But I don’t just want you to write a sequel because of the contract. It was a good book. It deserves an – ending.”

 

“The ending is that there isn’t one,” Louis hisses. “Is this an ending? Am I an ending? My father was a drunk, too, because of his war. I never had any use for him. And now I’m him, just twenty-five years apart. No one wants to read about us, Harry.” Louis’ breathing sounds harsh. He is at the point, Harry knows, where it has become painful to stand, but sitting might be worse.

 

“I am every man of my generation in England,” Louis concludes. “They would rather have buried us with our friends than look at us now.”

 

“I don’t think that’s true,” Harry protests, but even as he says it, he knows it sounds weak. He is not sure that he believes it himself, not in the face of Louis’ pain.

 

“No one will say it,” Louis replies. “But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. And that’s not the book that they want to read. The men who were there don’t need the reminder and everyone who wasn’t – let them have their glorious war. They want to remember it that way. Everyone does. At least I know my place, out of the bloody way.”

 

“What about Liam?” Harry asks.

 

“What _about_ Liam?” Louis retorts. “He wants to wallow over it, doesn’t he? There’s no point to it.”

 

Harry frowns. He wants to point out, maybe, that Louis does not seem like he has moved an inch past 1945, either, but there does not seem to be an elegant way to put that, or indeed any value in driving home a point that Louis no doubt, in his heart of hearts, knows and has buried.

 

“Anyway,” Louis says. “It’s not his business if I want to stay here alone, or not.”

 

Harry hesitates. “Did you know that the book bothered him?”

 

“Of course I know that,” Louis says, and Harry can tell that he’s being truthful. “Just because I didn’t answer his letters doesn’t mean I didn’t read them. And I know Liam. I lived in his fucking pocket for three years. I know how he feels about things. Not writing the sequel is practically a bloody courtesy to him.”

 

“You knew that he doesn’t want you to write the sequel?” Harry asks, surprised.

 

“Did he say that?” Louis sounds grim. “Of course he doesn’t. He knows how it ends, too.”

 

“But writing down what happened won’t change it,” Harry says. “Not mentioning it isn’t going to make it not happen.”

 

“If it’s not written down, it stays where it belongs: In the past.” Louis sinks down into the chair again, his face contorting. “What happened to us belongs to us. I don’t owe it to anyone, to put it out there into the world. For one thing, I don’t think it needs any more heartbreak. Can you bring me something to drink?”

 

Harry doesn’t need to be asked to add the whiskey, this time. When he brings the cup of tea, he sets it on the window ledge and leaves the bottle. Louis has lapsed back into silence again, and this time, he does not thank Harry for his help.

 

-

 

Harry is at the impromptu desk that he has set up for himself in the kitchen when he hears a roaring engine coming up the laneway. He is out of his chair in an instant, going into the front room to pull back the curtains.

 

The car is not quite as nice as Harry’s; he frowns, very faintly, when he sees how close it has been parked to his Mercedes. It looks like it could use a coat of paint, and if the sputter as the engine dies is any indication, it needs more than that.

 

The man that gets out is of average height and build, though he has the kind of shoulders that suggest to Harry that at some point or another, he may have been rather impressive. His hair is swept back in the style of the day, though the ends look like they want to curl – not unlike Harry’s, when the weather is damp.

 

Liam – for it can only be him; despite the fact that he doesn’t look very much like the only photo Harry has seen, Louis does not entertain visitors – stops and tilts his head back to look up at the house. It is a grey and windy day; Harry knows what the house looks like in this kind of weather, as though it is staring back at you. It is a strange thing, but it really does look more cheerful when the sun is out.

 

Liam slowly makes his way toward the house, and Harry belatedly lets the curtains go even as they make eye contact. Knowing he’s been found out, he hurries to the front door and opens it just as Liam gains the top step.

 

The two of them stop, and regard each other for a long moment.

 

“Are you Harry Styles?” Liam has the sort of presence that makes you want to let him take control of the situation. Harry wonders if he learned that in the army or if he’s always been like that. If it’s the latter, then surely that was why he and Louis did not get along well in the beginning.

 

“Yes. And you’re Liam Payne.” Harry reaches out, and they exchange a firm handshake.

 

“Are you staying here?” Liam asks. “Or – how did you know when I’d be coming?”

 

“I didn’t,” Harry replies. “I’ve holed up in a room at the back of the house.” He means it light-heartedly when he adds, “Louis is occasionally a difficult client.”

 

“Oh, I don’t doubt that he is almost always a difficult client. But one who makes you a lot of money.” Liam does not say this like it is a question or up for debate. “I read up on… how successful the book was. I guess I wasn’t really… interested, at the time.”

 

“It was a very impressive debut effort,” Harry agrees, a little warily.

 

“Is he in?” Liam asks, glancing up at the roof of the porch as if he expects to spot Louis through it.

 

“Ah – yeah, about that.” Harry gathers himself. “He doesn’t receive visitors. He asked me to tell you that he doesn’t want to see you.”

 

There is a brief silence.

 

Liam blinks at him, and then laughs. “Still a prick, then. Good. At least I’ll know what I’m dealing with.”

 

He side-steps Harry, although truth be told, Harry doesn’t do much to prevent it. He turns as Liam walks into the house, following him into the dimness of the front hall.

 

“Is he upstairs?” Liam asks.

 

“I cannot emphasize enough how much he does not want to see you,” Harry replies.

 

Liam takes that as the affirmation it is, and jogs up the stairs two at a time. Harry follows at a more sedate pace, bracing himself.

 

Liam strides down the hall, then stops and turns to look at Harry, who has just cleared the top stair.

 

“Which room is his?”

 

As it turns out, Harry does not need to answer that, because one of the doors swings open.

 

Louis is scowling to absolutely beat the devil.

 

Liam stops, half-turned. “Did you tell your publisher not to let me in?”

 

“I’m his agent,” Harry says automatically.

 

“Yes,” Louis says, addressing Liam but glaring at Harry. “If you are going to appoint yourself my butler, at least be a good one. For heaven’s sake, Harold. I hope you’re a better literary agent than you are a manservant or I shall have to take my work elsewhere.”

 

“Who else would have you?” Liam asks. “Your house is a disaster and you’re obnoxious. Come downstairs; Harry will make us tea.”

 

“I’m not actually his manservant, you know,” Harry mutters.

 

He makes the tea anyway.

 

When Louis finally stumps down the stairs and makes his way into the kitchen, Harry notices that his limp is less noticeable. He wonders if this is for Liam’s benefit. Liam does not appear even to notice, sitting with his cup in front of him, untouched, as he waits for Louis to maneuver himself into a chair.

 

“You didn’t answer my letters,” Liam says flatly, the moment Louis is sitting.

 

Harry, almost belatedly, retreats to the front room. He can still hear them speaking, but it feels less intrusive than hovering by the stove.

 

“No,” Louis agrees. “They were sentimental nonsense.”

 

“Don’t be a fucking – don’t be like that. You’re the only one who knows what I’ve been through, and I can’t even talk to you about it because you’re such an absolute cock.”

 

“Nah, mate; I was always an absolute cock.”

 

Liam jerks his head impatiently. “Yeah, you were, but you were my friend.”

 

“Liam, this is not…” Louis’ hand twists on the table, curling in on itself. “It’s not about you, mate.”

 

“I know that it isn’t,” Liam replies. “But all the same, it’s just not good enough, is it? I wrote you once a month for two years, and I never heard a damn thing. And then all of a sudden I see copies of a book everywhere with your face on the jacket and _I’m_ in it.”

 

Louis’ voice is brittle. “Would’ve thought you’d be flattered, Payno.”

 

“Don’t you dare.” Liam no longer sounds remotely affable. “That’s _my_ pain, too. I didn’t give you permission to put it out there, for everyone to see. Did you even change a single detail?”

 

“You would know, wouldn’t you?” Louis doesn’t really want to keep going, doesn’t want to push this, but he can’t seem to make himself stop. “It’s your pain, you said.”

 

“Do you think I read it?” Liam asks, incredulous. “I got through maybe forty pages. Then I set it down and I couldn’t even look at it for a week. Ended up giving it to my postman.”

 

“Practical.”

 

Liam is unimpressed. “Did you think you were respecting his memory, writing that? Did you think you were respecting mine?”

 

Louis’ voice grows quieter. “It wasn’t about respecting anyone. I did my best to be honest, to tell the truth – to write it the way I remembered it. I knew that – mine was only one way of seeing it. But I wrote it for myself. I can admit that. It was too much noise, in my head. I couldn’t sleep at night. I needed it out.”

 

“Then you should have locked it away,” Liam says. “There was no need to publish it. It was a wound, Louis. Everyone else might have liked it, but anyone who served, well… to me, it was obvious that it was all of your damage – all of our damage.”

 

“I don’t know.” Louis sounds like he had a better answer, but thought the better of it. Harry resolves that he will ask him, once Liam is gone.

 

“That’s not really good enough, mate, is it?”

 

Louis shifts uncomfortably in his chair, and it scrapes aberrantly on the floor. “I didn’t publish it to hurt anyone. I didn’t even think that anyone would read it, really. I just… got tired of hurting by myself. It was a way of getting it out of the house.”

 

Liam is silent for a moment. Then: “Did it work?”

 

The derisive noise that Louis makes is almost startling. “What do you think?”

 

From the other room, Harry almost wants to say something. Louis has never been exactly easy to get on with, it’s true, but when Harry had first met him, after he had finished writing the book, he had been… easier, in himself. Now it feels like he is all closing doors, slamming shut.

 

“Did it ever heal? That hip?”

 

Louis hesitates. “Not splendidly, no. Surprising, of course, given the absolute height of professionalism in all of the medical personnel I met at the front, but there you are.”

 

This is something that they can do. Taking a thing out on someone else, when it is a thing with which they are both familiar, feels like safer ground. “If it were me, you know,” Liam says, “I’d just have cut it off.”

 

Louis guffaws. “What, the whole left side of my body?”

 

“Obviously,” Liam replies.

 

“Well, then, welcome to the medical unit, Liam; you’ll fit right in. Shall I direct you to the bone saws?”

 

“At least they always had enough morphine.”

 

Louis leans back in his chair, shaking his head. He is not ending the joke, but he knows he can be real. “I can’t get on with morphine.”

 

Liam is surprisingly careful about the topic. “Well, it’s not for everyone. Not over the long term.”

 

“Don’t get me wrong,” Louis says. “I liked it. In fact, that was the problem.”

 

“I never…” Liam begins his sentence, hesitates, then back-tracks. “It’s not that I want to feel pain. But sometimes you just have to. Sometimes you have to let it in. That’s how I felt at the end of the war, when it was just – days, yeah? It was like we were all just counting down the days until it was over. And when I was injured, I felt like I wanted to hang onto that, that visceral _bad_ ness. It’s silly, really, because I’ll never forget what the war was like, not until my dying day, and yet – dunno. It was like it was inside of me, and it needed to get out. I didn’t want to get – far away from it, years from now, and have it dulled, what it felt like to be there.”

 

Maybe the sentiment doesn’t make any sense, but Louis doesn’t question it. He knows better than anyone how it feels to try to put a feeling into words and give it life.

 

“I used to think that the worst day of the rest of my life wouldn’t be as bad as the best day on the battlefield.” That is Louis, this time. “But what is this we’re doing? Is this life?”

 

“For some,” Liam says. “Some of us go to work. Some people… have a family. They do what they can.”

 

“And do you?” Louis sounds like he already knows the answer. “Have a family?”

 

There is a brief silence. “No,” Liam says at last. “No, I never – it was something I wanted, but it hasn’t happened yet.”

 

“Huh.”

 

The silence that follows after that prompts Harry to notice how obvious it must be to them that he is listening, so he waits until they start up speaking again about something else before he quietly gets up and takes himself outside.

 

-

 

_Niall had called ahead, so when he arrived at the house, Louis was expecting him. He limped slowly out onto the porch, grip tight on his cane, and watched Niall’s old Daimler Fifteen struggle up the driveway. It seemed relieved when Niall took mercy on it and killed the engine halfway up, getting out to complete the journey on foot._

_Niall lifted a hand to wave when he looked up and saw Louis looking. Louis just nodded, watching his progress._

_“Alright, mate?” Niall reached out with his left hand, and they endured an awkward will-they-won’t-they moment when it became clear that Louis was resting much of his weight on his left hand, via the cane. Niall ended up clasping him on the shoulder._

_“Lost the other one,” he informed Louis, holding up a shirt sleeve that, Louis realized abruptly, ended in nothing at all. “Stupid. Got my last three fingers shot clean off, then I wrapped it and sort of hoped for the best – we were a few days out, medics were out of supplies, reckoned I was bloody hero, the whole mess. Anyway, it got infected, obviously. Gangrene, pure hideous. They had to take the whole thing.”_

 

_“I hope that’s not the story you tell the girls,” Louis said, turning to lead the way inside. Niall did not help him open the door or make his way down the hall, and Louis found himself absurdly grateful._

_“What about you?” Niall asked, nodding at Louis’ hip as he followed him into the kitchen. “That a shrapnel wound?”_

_“Good eye.” Louis laboriously topped off the kettle with water and set it on the stove. It was still warm from earlier; he drank much more tea than he used to, now that it dulled the taste of whiskey._

_Niall sat down in one of the kitchen chairs behind him, drumming his fingers on his knee. The other arm rested sort of oddly, as though Niall had planned on clasping his hands and then remembered abruptly at the point when contact should have happened that he couldn’t._

_“They got rid of proper shrapnel shells at the end of the First World War,” Niall said musingly. “When they came up with the high-explosive fragmenting ones. Didn’t rely so much on, you know.” He moved his hand, mimicking the arc of a falling shell. “The velocity of the shell itself. Just exploded and blew chunks of itself everywhere. Fragments, they call ‘em.”_

_“Lucky me,” Louis said wryly. “Still bits and pieces of shit stuck in my body that ought not to be there.”_

_“That’s so,” Niall agreed. “I know it’s not much use to you now, but I’ve heard that it aches a bit less, over time.”_

_“So they say.” He did not remark that it had been a few years already, and the pain had relented only a little. “Tea?”_

_“Yeah, go on.” Niall got up and came over to the stove as Louis poured the tea out into cups, reaching to collect up his own so that Louis had a hand free to use his cane as he made his way to the table._

_“You still talk to the lads?” Niall asked, when they were seated and Louis’ cane rested against the table, behind him and out of the way. “Your mates from the war?”_

_“Zayn was killed in action,” Louis said, in that tight, controlled way that he always delivered that news, as though it had happened to someone he did not know particularly well._

_“Ah, yeah, I’d heard about that.” Niall shook his head slowly. “Sorry, mate. For what it’s worth, I hear they had German prisoners building proper nice cemeteries for our lads over there. Had them, like – landscaping it, planting trees and that. He’ll have a real grave-site and everything.”_

_Louis gave a little shrug, so nearly imperceptible that it was not clear whether it was even intentional. Niall had not asked whether Louis had visited that grave-site, and Louis would not volunteer the information._

_“What about Liam?” Niall pressed on. “Do you talk to him?”_

_“No,” Louis replied. “No, I think – it’s better if we don’t.”_

_Niall nodded along, and didn’t push any further. “Have you gone back to work? Or - are you going to be able to go back to work, do you think?”_

_Louis shrugged. “What would I do? I can’t sit or stand for a long time.”_

_“I’ve got a problem as well,” Niall pointed out. “If I were educated, I’m sure I could find something. Anything that wasn’t – you know, manual labour, I could likely do with just the one hand. But as it was, I just went back to Ireland to help my old da with the farm.”_

_“It’s better than nothing,” Louis said._

_“Aye, it is that,” Niall agreed. “It’s something to do.”_

_“Did you come for any reason in particular?” Louis asked, not unkindly. “I don’t get many visitors, these days. Mainly because I’ve not told anyone where I live.”_

_“You weren’t that hard to find,” Niall told him. “Not now that you’re famous.” He winked._

_“I don’t think famous is the right word,” Liam says drily._

_“You’re a famous writer, and I won’t hear anything else about it,” Niall said, obviously ribbing him, but Louis found that he didn’t mind. It had been a very long time since he had been mocked in a friendly way. “I called your agent right up and said, I’ve got to find this famous writer, as he’s a close personal friend of mine. And he said, is that right? To which I responded that we’d spoken twice, maybe even three times.”_

_Louis grinned. “I’d give you four. If we’re counting when you cussed me out for talking too much in the bunks.”_

_“Of course I’m countin’ that. Why wouldn’t I? Anyway, he gave in only because I said we were friends from the war. He’s a curious type, that agent of yours. Suddenly it was all questions.”_

_“Yeah.” Louis paused. “He’s… a nice lad. But he didn’t fight, I don’t think.”_

_“No, he’s too young. To him the war’s like a naughty magazine that your older brother’s got. Even if it’s rubbish, it’s still got that sort of magic. It’s exciting, like.”_

_“Yeah, a bit.” Louis shifted a little, already growing uncomfortable with having been sitting for so long. Niall rose at once; Louis pointed wordlessly toward a stack of cushions on the window seat, and Niall fetched him the top-most one and helped him wedge it behind his back and just under his hip._

_“He may get a chance at it yet, though,” Niall said. “They’ve made a proper mess of it in Korea. Only a matter of time before it’s all of the same nonsense again.”_

_“I haven’t been keeping up with any of it,” Louis replied. “I don’t even get the paper, anymore.”_

_“Do they not send it, this far out?” Niall asked._

_“Oh, they’ve tried,” Louis said. “I let them pile up next to the stairs, then I kicked them all clear of the house and lit them on fire one day when the paper lad was coming up the drive. He doesn’t come anymore.”_

_“You’re a codgery old man,” Niall told him, and there was amusement in his tone, but concern etched in the corners of his eyes. “And you’re what – thirty-something?”_

_“I feel about ten thousand,” Louis said, finishing his tea._

_“That’s the gin, that does that,” Niall said, rising to fetch the kettle and indicating the bottles that were lined up next to the cabinet as he did so._

_“That’s the war that does that,” Louis corrected. And: “Speaking of gin.”_

_Niall obliged him and added a generous portion to his tea._

_“Anyway, I was tellin’ you why I needed to see you,” he said, returning to the table. “Do you remember… would’ve been early on. 1942? The spring – maybe early summer? I fancied myself a proper photographer, was running about getting shots of everyone?”_

_“I remember,” Louis said slowly. “You got the three of us. Me, Liam, and Zayn.”_

_“I did,” Niall confirmed. “And I got the photos developed on my next leave, but then I mailed them home and sort of forgot about them. You know. I got busy, trying not to get killed and all that.”_

_“A task that being in France at that point made difficult,” Louis said with a hint of dryness._

_“As you’re aware,” Niall agreed. “So I went home to see my old ma and da at the end of the war, and ma had packed all of my photos away in a box so that they wouldn’t get damaged. And I didn’t go through them at first, because… well, you know.”_

_Louis did know._

_“But eventually I had a look, because I knew there were some in there that were actually decent. And I thought – you know, maybe some of the people in them might be interested in seeing them.” Niall reached into his pocket and took out a small stack of photographs. He slid the top one across the table toward Louis._

_Louis leaned forward, feeling a strange rattling in his ribcage, like his heart had gone hard and brittle. The photo was very slightly blurry around the edges. Louis’ hair looked paler than it was, in black and white, and their faces were much younger than Louis remembered them being._

_They were all smiling. The sun was shining, and they were alive in a moment that would live forever._

_Bless Niall and that fucking camera._

_Louis realized that his hands were shaking only once he withdrew them from the table and folded them in his lap. “That’s a – very good photo.”_

_“I thought so,” Niall said, cheerful but carefully avoiding the emotion in Louis’ voice. “I’ve got another one, too, where you’re all looking head on and acting like boys in a school photo, but this one is better.”_

_“I… can I keep it, for a while?” Louis asked._

_“You can keep it for always, mate,” Niall told him firmly. “It’s meant to be yours. I was only ever looking after it for you.”_

_“Have you got the other one, as well?” Louis asked._

_“Of course,” Niall said. He fumbled a little with the stack, clumsy with one hand, and found the second one. Setting it down next to the first one, he added, “You can look at the others too, if you like. You’ll know all the lads in here.”_

_“Thanks.” Louis took one more long look at the photo of the three of them, then reached for the stack in front of Niall._


	9. I Miss the Conversations Between Us/There's Nothing Wrong With Being a Dreamer

Liam does not spend the night at the house, but by the time he leaves, Louis has walked him to the door and is watching him go from the front stairs. When he comes back inside the house, to Harry’s surprise, Louis makes his way into the kitchen and sits down at the scarred kitchen table.

 

Harry does not even ask at this point; he puts the kettle on once more.

 

“He seemed in a better mood,” Harry volunteers, as he sets about slicing bread. Louis has not asked for food, but Harry knows by now that he isn’t likely to.

 

“Aye, well. I apologized, didn’t I?”

 

Harry glances back over his shoulder. “Apologized?”

 

“For the book,” Louis says. “He’s easy, Liam is. He can only hold a grudge for so long.”

 

“Was he very upset?” Harry asks.

 

“Well, you heard him, no doubt,” Louis says wryly. “Though I don’t know that he was upset so much as… well, just felt like he didn’t get a chance to have his say, yeah? Not that… I assumed he ever wanted to. Things were strange, after the war.”

 

Harry nods, slowly. “Is that him, in your photo?” he ventures, spreading mustard on a slice of rye. He knows that it is, but he has learned by now that it is best not to pretend to know Louis; it is best if Louis has the chance to give his version.

 

“In the study? Yes. Him, and Zayn.” Louis withdraws back into himself for a moment. Harry gives him space, finishing his task and setting the sandwich on a plate, fixing Louis a cup of tea.

 

“Zayn was decorated, for saving my life.” He sounds like this is difficult to say; it clings in a raw way to his voice, as though it wants to climb back inside. “Posthumously.”

 

Harry comes slowly to the table, setting the sandwich and tea down in front of him. Louis has his elbows rested on his knees, and he is leaned forward in that way he does sometimes, as though he wonders whether it will take some of the pressure off of his hip (it never does).

 

“They wanted to award one to Liam, as well. He carried me from the battlefield – not just me, others too. But he rejected it.”

 

Harry hesitates. Then he sits down kitty-corner to Louis, and waits.

 

“I don’t know how this happens. How God decides who survives and who doesn’t. Zayn would have opened a shop. It would have sold better books than mine. And he was… very, very well-loved.”

 

Harry thinks back to the letters he read in the study, to the photo with all the little girls. “Louis, if you… reached out…”

 

“That’s just it, though, isn’t it?” Louis doesn’t need him to finish. “No one could ever love me enough to make up for the fact that I’m alive and he isn’t. I don’t even want it. I don’t want them taking care of me, like I deserve it. Don’t get me wrong – this isn’t self-pity. I am just so tired of thinking about how much better the world would be with him in it. Better than it is, with me in my small, bitter corner of it.”

 

“It doesn’t have to be like that,” Harry says, a little sharply.

 

“If that’s advice, it’s rubbish.” Louis shoots him a look as he reaches for his tea, and Harry senses another slamming door.

 

-

 

Liam returns the next day, and the day after that. Harry doesn’t know what they discuss, but for the rest of the week it is a regular thing. Liam comes by in the morning, usually, and stays until after lunch. The two of them hole up in Louis’ study for hours.

 

When Liam doesn’t come on Saturday, Harry asks Louis about it.

 

Louis raises an eyebrow. “He works, doesn’t he? Can’t loaf about here forever.”

 

Louis is almost out of the room before he pauses. “Don’t you work, as well?”

 

“I do,” Harry says honestly. “I do as much as I can from here.”

 

“You can go into town, Harry,” Louis tells him. “I don’t need to be looked after.”

 

“The thing is,” Harry says, “that you owe another book on your contract. And I can’t – I simply can’t leave here until I know you’ve made some headway.”

 

“What if it’s years?” Louis asks. He has turned to face Harry, and he sounds – if not faintly challenging, at least interested in the response. “What if I never finish it?”

 

“Well, I won’t – be here for years,” Harry says. “But I just… I like you, Louis. I liked your book. Despite how difficult you’ve been, at times, I really think that writing makes you feel better. I’d like to see you succeed.”

 

Louis stares at him for a moment, blinks, then turns and walks out of the room. “I’ll take tea in my room,” he calls over his shoulder.

 

-

 

Harry spends the next fortnight more or less leaving Louis to his own devices, but now they seem to have come to some kind of unspoken agreement. Harry continues to make Louis’ meals, but Louis comes down most days to put his dishes in the sink, and to ask – if someone perfunctorily – about Harry’s day. Harry finds himself missing his flat in the city less and less, which is slightly alarming, but not quite as alarming as the fact that the drafty old house is starting to feel like home.

 

It is an unusually sunny morning for this late in the season when he hears, from his work station in the front room, Louis moving about in the kitchen.

 

“Louis,” he calls, making the decision in an instant. “Do you want to go for a walk?”

 

All noise from the kitchen stops. “A walk?”

 

“Yes,” Harry says. “Around the edge of the estate. I assume it goes all the way down to the water.”

 

“It does,” Louis says, sounding slightly wary. “But it’s not been kept up. You’ll need your wellies.”

 

“You have at least seven pairs in the hall closet,” Harry points out.

 

“I don’t own wellies at all,” Louis says. “Another gift from the previous owner, I gather.”

 

“What size do you wear?” Harry asks.

 

“In wellies? Not a clue. I’m a nine. My army boots were a ten.”

 

Harry takes that as an indication that Louis is interested, so he rises and makes his way to the hall closet. Louis comes to stand in the kitchen doorway behind him as Harry surveys the boots for a moment, then gets down on his knees to check the sizes.

 

“I’ve got… well, the size is rubbed off, but check if it’s right.” Harry sets a boot upright in the hallway, and Louis obligingly comes closer. Before Harry can stand, Louis has curled a hand around his shoulder for balance as he pushes his foot into the boot.

 

“That’s alright,” Louis says. “Has it got a mate?”

 

“Well, you’ll not be going out in your stocking feet,” Harry says, dragging the second one out from under the pile and setting it upright, too.

 

“Stocking foot,” Louis corrects, wiggling his toes. “I’ve got a wellie on the other one.”

 

“You’d best put on a jacket,” Harry says, ignoring the way Louis smirks. “And a hat. I’ll fetch one down for you, won’t be half a minute.”

 

Harry gets Louis sent on his way first, and then hunts around for his own outdoor clothing. He is tying on a scarf when he glances out the window and sees Louis stepping into the mud, and then squelchily lifting his boots. He seems very interested in the way the mud tugs at the soles, and he stomps once or twice more, rather like a child enjoying the muck after a rainfall.

 

Harry wipes the smile from his face before he goes outside.

 

“I never liked walks,” Louis says, when they are perhaps one hundred paces from the house.

 

Harry can’t help but laugh. “You could have said no. In any case, walks are good for you.”

 

“So is broccoli, but I don’t like that either,” Louis retorts.

 

Harry glances over at him, still grinning. “You eat it when I cook it.”

 

“Yes, well, I’m not a _child._ ”

 

“No, you’re a very serious person.” Harry’s mouth twitches.

 

“Oi.” Louis glowers at him. “Listen, you. If you’d walked as bloody far as I have in your lifetime, you’d call it quits as well. I don’t think I sat down between 1942 and 1944.”

 

“I don’t think I could have served, even if I hadn’t been too young,” Harry says. “I’ve got flat feet.”

 

“Yeah, you would have had a medical exemption,” Louis mutters. “Lucky you. But they would have found something else for you to do. My mate used to be in one of those big stations along the Channel, watching for German submarines at night. He’d shine the big light out onto the water, yeah? And then when he saw a submarine, there would be a signal, and they would have lie down on the floor with their hands over their ears and their mouths open while the guns were fired.”

 

“Why did they need their mouths open?” Harry asks.

 

“Do you have any idea how loud those guns were, from that close?” Louis demands. “To equalize the pressure in their ears. He’s half-deaf now, so I can’t say it worked, but there you are.”

 

“You must have stood near some big guns yourself,” Harry offers.

 

“Yeah, and the lower registers of my hearing are starting to go,” Louis says seriously. “That’s why I ignore you completely whenever you ask me if I’m writing my novel.”

 

“Hey.” Harry tries his best to look wounded.

 

“I think I just got lucky, in all honesty.” Louis jams one hand into the pockets of his jacket, but keeps the other one free - cautious. “Not that it matters. Even if it _were_ starting to go, the military would never take responsibility. Can you imagine? If every Englishman could sue the government for what’s happened? They wouldn’t have time to sleep.”

 

“But you get a pension,” Harry says.

 

“Does it compensate for the fact that I can’t hold a job or get a full night’s sleep without a bottle of gin in me?” Louis shakes his head. “A pension is just a way for the government to say, ‘go on your way, get fucked, have a nice day’. That’s all.”

 

“You, um. I know it’s none of my business, but…” Harry searches for a way to put it out there.

 

Next to him, Louis stops to wrestle a dead limb from a tree. It comes free with a splintering crack, and Louis turns it over to peel the smaller branches away. “Well, spit it out,” he says, but less impatiently than he would have, Harry thinks, if they were indoors and he had nothing to do.

 

Louis might hate walks, but burning off pent-up energy appears to do him good.

 

“You have some bills, piling up,” Harry says. “I don’t read your post, but some of them have ‘Final Notice’ stamped on the front.” That’s partly a lie – while Louis has received several bills in the mail since Harry has arrived, it is the opened ones in Louis’ front room cabinet that gave him the picture of Louis’ financial situation.

 

“Ah.” Louis takes a small knife from his pocket and scrapes the last few branches away, smoothing down the end of what will be a perfectly functional walking stick.

 

“If you told me where I could find your accounts, I could settle them for you,” Harry offers. “I don’t mind driving into town to put the payments in the post.”

 

“Well, that would be all well and good,” Louis says, “but I haven’t got any money to make the payments.”

 

Harry is at a loss. “What do you mean?”

 

“I mean,” Louis says, stabbing his walking stick into the mud to test its sturdiness, “I have a pension cheque coming in at the end of the month, but until then, I haven’t two pennies to rub together.”

 

“But what about the royalties?” Harry asks. “The earnings from the book? I know when we signed your contract that you’re entitled to – a fair sum.”

 

Louis begins walking again, his stride somewhat more confident now that he has found himself a walking stick. “That money doesn’t belong to me,” he says. “The cheque comes to you, you cash it for me and put it in my account, and I immediately write a cheque and send it away.”

 

“To… whom?” Harry asks.

 

“Zayn has a mum, dad, and three sisters,” Louis says. His brow is a little furrowed. “They live not far from here. I’ve never been to see them; I can’t bear it. But I send them a cheque every month, and they always cash it. So I gather they feel the way I do. That… at least some measure of his death is my fault.”

 

The sky above them is very blue. Somewhere, a bird sings a high note followed by two lower, sadder ones.

 

“Or they know that you need them to cash it so that you don’t feel so guilty,” Harry offers.

 

Louis looks over at him without turning his head, just one sharp blue eye fixed on him, but he seems thoughtful rather than annoyed. “Aye, well, if they’re anything like him, then you’re probably right,” he admits. “At any rate, I’ve heard that the youngest one has gone to uni. I don’t know if it’s with the help of any of the money I send, but I like that. I reckon Zayn would’ve liked it, too.”

 

“One of his sisters?” Harry asks. “What’s she taking?”

 

“It’s the ‘50s; women can go to uni if they’d like,” Louis tells him, rather loftily.

 

“Yes, I know that,” Harry says. He nearly rolls his eyes, but knows that he needn’t bother; Louis is just as likely to be taking the mick. An eyeroll would only please him. “I was only asking.”

 

“I think she’s in some kind of science,” Louis says. “You know his older sister made shells during the war.”

 

“Really?” Harry asks. This is quite possibly the chattiest that Louis has ever been in his company.

 

“Those big, twenty-five pound ones,” Louis tells him, holding out his hands to demonstrate the size. “She took on a factory job while her boyfriend was off getting himself killed in an airplane over Berlin. I reckon she got her own back, if she made enough of those massive fuck-off shells.”

 

“What does she do now?” Harry asks.

 

“She found another boyfriend and married him,” Louis says. “That’s what most of them do, isn’t it? People, I mean.”

 

“Yeah, I suppose,” Harry says thoughtfully. They have drawn closer to the river; he can hear it from behind the thick row of cedars ahead of them, through which the path winds a narrow trajectory.

 

“Some of us won’t,” Louis tells him. “I won’t. Liam… might. But only because some girl will sucker him into it. He’ll throw himself into being a family man because he’ll want it to work, so it will.”

 

Harry glances over at him. Louis’ attention is fixed on where he’s putting his feet, his strides a little lopsided as he favours his better side. “Why won’t you?”

 

“Don’t get me wrong; I always liked children. We had loads at home. I know you’ve seen the photo of me in that stupid collar with all of the bairns in my study.” Louis stands by to let Harry pass through the row of trees first, then falls back in behind him. “But it’s not going to happen now, is it? I can’t keep a wife, with the temperament that I’ve got. I’ve got a fighting streak, inside. Not the whole war, obviously, but my piece of it. It’s a mile wide, and it’s not going away.”

 

“A fight, inside,” Harry repeats, stopping when he sees the river for the first time. It is not too wide to cross, though he thinks that in the spring it must become a torrent. Now it bounces cheerfully enough from stone to stone, and Harry thinks it likely that they could ford it without getting wet, if they wanted.

 

“Yeah,” Louis says, stopping too, leaning on his stick.

 

“That’s why you’re the writer.”

 

“It’s funny, that.” Louis stoops down, wincing only a little, and scoops up a stone.

 

“What’s funny?” Harry asks, as Louis makes a poor attempt at skipping the stone across the top of a shallow pool that sits adjacent to the flowing water.

 

“I was absolutely rubbish in school,” Louis says. “Not just at writing – at everything. Could not be arsed. Never made it past year seven, and even then, I only made it that far because my mum told me I’d have to stay home and look after the little ones if I didn’t.”

 

Harry smiles. “You? Not being arsed to do something?”

 

“Shut it,” Louis says, but without heat. “I don’t think I’d written a thing in years – nothing more than my name, anyway – until I got home from the war.”

 

“So what made you decide to write?” Harry asks him. He fetches a handful of pebbles, and holds them out for Louis to take his pick, rather than forcing him to bend down and root through the stones on the ground for his own.

 

“I was home a few weeks – maybe that’s not right. It might have been a month, or two. I was staying in a sort of… not a hospital. A halfway house, for soldiers still recovering from their injuries after being invalided home.” Louis skips a second rock, this time with more success. It bounces twice before dipping beneath the surface of the water. “I got a letter, in the post.”

 

Harry waits. Louis leans his stick against a tree, takes another rock from Harry’s hand, and makes another throw.

 

“It turns out that Zayn, conscientious lad that he was, visited a barrister when he was home on leave. Got himself a will drawn up, wanted to make sure that his mum and his sisters would be taken care of. That was the last time he was home. Fuck me if I don’t wonder sometimes if he knew.” Louis does not look at Harry as he speaks.

 

Harry drifts closer to the river bank, crouching down to draw his fingers through the water. It is colder than he had imagined it would be. He knows that Louis is watching him, just as he knows that it is easier that way than it would be the other way around.

 

“So I got my letter in the post, and it turned out that I had inherited something of Zayn’s. It was all very official. At first, I honestly didn’t want it. I kept the letter, but when I got a flat of my own I sort of stashed it away and tried to forget about it.”

 

A stone goes skipping past Harry.

 

“Anyway, I didn’t hear from anyone relating to – Zayn’s estate, for a while. But sure enough, they tracked me down at my new address, and I got another letter. And then another. And then one night I was deep into my pints and I thought, fuck it. Whatever it is they’ve got, I’ll go and tell them that I don’t want it, and they’ll leave me be.”

 

Harry glances back at him. Louis is leaning against the tree now, eyes fixed on the water.

 

“I got the train up to the Bradford, and I went to the barrister’s office. I didn’t want to see Zayn’s family, didn’t want anything to do with it beyond telling whoever I needed to that I didn’t want whatever they were trying to foist off on me. When I got there, they had it all packaged up for me – this brown box. Or rather, a box wrapped in brown paper. The barrister apologized to me on behalf of the family, said they’d lost the case. At this point, I hadn’t a clue what he was on about.”

 

Harry is fairly certain that he can see where this is going. He turns back to the water, standing up slowly, his knees cracking stiffly.

 

“It was his typewriter, of course. He’d wanted to open a book shop, but he had also fancied himself a bit of an amateur writer. He never let Liam or I read any of it, but he always said that after the war he thought he might write a book. There was a note with the typewriter, nothing much – didn’t know he was going to die, did he? So he wasn’t about to sit down and pen me a proper novel. But he said that he didn’t think that Liam would get much use out of it, but I might. Since writing is a bit like a having a long, one-sided conversation, and I liked to talk so much, and all. Cheeky.”

 

Harry blinks at the way his eyes are suddenly dry, prickling along the edges. “It’s only a one-sided conversation until someone reads it,” he says.

 

“Well, yeah,” Louis replies, making eye contact. “Why do you think I published it?”

 

-

 

Louis seems to be in a better mood when they return to the house, although the walk through the mud seems to have taken him the wrong way and he spends much of the next day confined to his bed. Harry brings him compresses and whiskey and tea, and sometimes Louis is even game for a little conversation.

 

The second time Harry comes up the following afternoon, Louis is somewhat livelier than he had been earlier, although when he tries to roll onto his side and prop himself up on his elbow to drink his tea, the grimace that accompanies the grunt that is forced out of him says a lot.

 

“Supposing I never write this book,” Louis says. “Just supposing. How long are you going to stay?”

 

“I don’t know,” Harry says thoughtfully. “I suppose until… something pressing comes up.”

 

“What if it’s absolute rubbish? What if I… churn out two or three hundred pages of pure, unpublishable nonsense?”

 

“You won’t do that,” Harry says firmly. “And if you do… I’m an editor. That’s what I’m here for.”

 

Louis eyes him, but does not continue the discussion further.

 

Later in the day, when he’s further into his cups, he calls out to Harry as the latter is leaving his room with his dirty tea cups.

 

“What if it wasn’t true? What if the ending was different than… the way it actually happened?”

 

Harry takes a moment to piece that together with what Louis had said earlier. “Then,” he says slowly, “the only one who will know is you, I think. And Liam. And me, if you want to tell me about it.”

 

By the time Harry returns, Louis is fast asleep, so he closes the curtains and sets about very quietly tidying around the bed where there is always a bottle or two and other odds and ends.

 

When Harry tugs out Louis’ sheet from where it’s tucked in so that he can adjust the corner, he is surprised by the sound of crinkling paper. Frowning, he lifts up the corner of the mattress as best he can with Louis’ dead weight on top of it, and retrieves a sheaf of papers held together with, of all things, a rubber band.

 

_'Zayn was always too clever to end up face-down in the mud like the rest of us. He didn’t wear his cleverness like a badge, though; it was something he used to help, when he could. He was the only one of the three of us to have done well at school, but he had never mentioned it. We only knew because he had had the grades to get into a decent university.'_  

Harry does not need to read any further to know that Louis has been writing again. Glancing quickly over at the still-sleeping form curled up awkwardly in whatever position doesn’t make his hip throb, Harry replaces the papers where he found them, tucking the sheet in the same as before.

 

He wonders where the change of heart came from. Maybe these are just more private ramblings that Louis intends to burn – or maybe he never burnt them in the first place.

 

Harry will have to think about how to proceed.


	10. Standing On the Landing, With the War You Shouldered All the Night Before

When the phone rings the next day, Harry is doused up to the elbows in flour as he keeps one eye on the cookbook that he has propped next to the bananas. Believing that it is likely work-related – no one ever calls Louis – Harry hastily scrubs his hands and wipes them dry on his trousers as he quickly makes his way into the corridor and snatches up the phone.

 

“Harry Styles,” he says.

 

“Oh – hi, Harry.” The voice is warm and affable.

 

“Hi, Liam,” Harry says, recognizing him at once. “Hope you’re well?”

 

“Oh, yeah, I’m alright. Thank you. I was hoping to speak to Louis, if he’s around.”

 

Harry glances to his right, where the staircase climbs up into the shadows, parallel with the front hall. “He overdid it a bit on a walk the other day, I think,” he says. “I haven’t heard him moving about. I checked on him this morning, of course.”

 

“Oh? That’s rubbish luck,” Liam says.

 

“Can I pass along any message?” Harry asks.

 

There’s a beat of silence down the line wherein Harry can just hear him breathing. “I don’t think so,” he says at last. “I just didn’t want to… lose touch, again. You know?”

 

“I think your visit did him rather a lot of good, actually,” Harry says.

 

“Is that right?” Liam sounds faintly pleased. “How do you know?”

 

“He’s in a better mood, for one,” Harry says. “And I think he’s maybe even been writing a few sneaky pages, here and there. Some of it handwritten, apparently so that I can’t hear the typewriter – or so I gather.”

 

There’s a hesitation. “He’s writing?”

 

Harry immediately remembers Liam’s feelings about the book and wants to kick himself. “I don’t know if it’s anything,” he says hastily. “It probably isn’t. He seems very sure that he isn’t writing another book.”

 

“So it wasn’t about us, then. Me, or Zayn.”

 

Harry opens his mouth – closes it. He’s a poor liar. “It – is, a bit. I don’t know. I didn’t read very far.”

 

“He told me he wasn’t going to,” Liam says, and he sounds upset. “I thought that I would only have to talk to him face to face for him to understand. He promised.”

 

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” Harry says quickly. “Like I said, I’m sure it’s nothing, love. He’s been mentioning about how writing about it is easier than talking about it. And I think it’s good for him to share it, even if it’s just with a page.”

 

“You don’t understand,” Liam tells him. “He’s got all of this time to – borrow from my life, borrow from Zayn’s. And he can’t even find the time to go to France to visit his best mate!”

 

Harry feels thrown. “What? What do you mean?”

 

“Zayn’s got one of those horrid white headstones.” The volume of Liam’s voice has risen. “I sent Louis the name of the cemetery, I told him how to get there. I told him I’d meet him there, even. And all of this time, he hasn’t been. He’d rather sit up in his tower, exploiting us – exploiting _him_ – than go and pay his respects.”

 

Harry lets out a quiet breath. “Oh, Liam. I’m sure he didn’t – ”

 

“If it weren’t for him, Zayn would still be alive,” Liam says, and his voice snaps out at Harry and back again, like he needs the force of it to hold himself together. “If it weren’t for him – and he hasn’t even the decency to – to see him, or to be honest with me about it. I fucking _hate him._ ”

 

“Don’t,” Harry pleads. “Please don’t. He didn’t mean anything by it. I truly should not have said anything. He hasn’t written anything of any – length, nothing I would be able to publish. I genuinely believe he’s just – exhibiting his grief differently than most people.”

 

“You didn’t know him, during the war,” Liam snaps. “And what do you really know about him now?”

 

“You’re right that I don’t know him like you do,” Harry says, slowly. “But I do know this: He lives in an old house, on his own. Completely by himself. No one rings, no one comes to call, no one writes.”

 

“That’s his fault, isn’t it?” Liam asks. “For pushing everyone away. For being selfish.”

 

“Yeah. But I think the thing is that… once Louis has gone and pushed people away, it’s all well and good. But then he’s not entirely sure how to get them back.” Harry leans against the wall, winding the telephone cord slowly through his fingers. “And he starts to believe that he doesn’t deserve to have them back. And you – he really missed you, Liam. I can guarantee you that. He missed you a lot. I think you will have to forgive him for not – being the best man he could be, after the war.”

 

“It’s not good enough, is it?” Liam’s voice has come down the other side and has begun to sound dull, a little aching but mostly tired. “Sorry, Harry; it’s not. And it’s not good enough that I’m getting all of this from his _agent_ instead of from him. I’ve given him enough chances. I don’t owe him anything else. And he – well, I think he owes Zayn at least a visit, to explain to him what he’s done. But I can’t talk to him about it again.”

 

“Would you still meet him there?” Harry asks. “If he went – would you still?”

 

“Louis wasn’t the only one who ended up – fucked up after the war, Harry.” The curse sounds odd coming out of Liam’s mouth. “I always liked looking after people. I liked making sure they got home safe. But I haven’t the energy or the – resources to do it for him anymore. I’m having a hard enough time holding myself together.”

 

Harry clutches the cradle of the phone tightly in one hand. “Will you at least think about coming to see him again? I swear, Liam – he’s not breaking any promises to you. He even hid it from me.”

 

“No, I’m quite finished.” Liam sounds final on that. “Maybe – I don’t know. In a year’s time. Maybe two. I’ll give it some thought again, I’ll see how I feel. If I’ve healed any, by then. If I’ve anything to give. It’s hard because – because I know that, had Zayn lived, this wouldn’t be happening. I don’t think he would want it like this. But I can’t go on the way it is.”

 

Harry has never met Zayn, but he wonders how he would feel about the way his memory has been twisted and turned to serve the needs of those he loved most. Or, perhaps, Zayn is as good as Harry has been told. More than likely, though, death was what had sainted him – like so many others of his generation. Harry thinks of a poem he read once, in a newspaper:  _The names are so faded you can hardly see/But the faces are always young to me._

 

_They were brave young men with hearts of gold/But most of them never got old._

 

“I wish I’d met Zayn,” Harry says quietly.

 

Liam makes a noise that sounds a little like a crack in a sob.

 

It makes Harry cringe, and it takes him a long moment to figure out why. He had been young still when the war ended, but not so young that he hadn’t had his fancy caught by the glorification of war, of _death so noble_. The young men of Liam’s generation were more than human – they were legend. Seeing the human edges of Liam was somehow different than seeing them on Louis, perhaps because Louis was more prone to anger than grief – or perhaps the anger was grief, but expressed differently.

 

“I’m sorry, Liam.”

 

“He was… very like he is in the book.” Liam sounds ragged, but something sits as solid as stone at the bottom of his words. “Louis got him right, in a lot of ways. I’m not upset with him for getting Zayn wrong. That’s not why I’m angry.”

 

Harry thinks he understands that.

 

When Harry gently replaces the phone on the hook, he becomes aware of a presence behind him. When he turns, he finds Louis’ expression hard to read. The latter leans in the doorway from the kitchen, the way he tends to lean in all doorways – always on the right, never on the left, shifting weight away from all the sore places that keep him awake at night.

 

“You should have met Zayn,” Louis says, and Harry does wonder how long he has been standing there, and what he has overheard. “I know that I’m a disappointment, and I don’t think you were expecting Liam to be like he is, either. Not much like he is in my book. But Zayn would’ve been. I think he might even have been better.”

 

“You’re not a disappointment,” Harry says.

 

Louis’ mouth does a bitter twist. “You don’t have to put it on, Harry. That version of me… I don’t know. It got away from me in the winter, I expect. I went into the winter of 1942 or ’43 and by the time the snow melted, I was someone else entirely. And Liam was like me, but idealistic. So of course he’s completely unrecognizable now.”

 

“They’re just characters,” Harry says, both because he knows that and because he is not sure that Louis recognizes that. “They aren’t you, they don’t have to be like you. I know that. I don’t think you ever give yourself enough credit, Louis.”

 

“You told him I was writing.” Louis changes the subject on a dime, but somehow it feels like a continuation of what they were talking about before. “Right?”

 

Harry lets out a slow breath, as though the extra time will help dismantle the fragility of the air. “I don’t think I should have.”

 

“No.” Louis shatters it, taking none of the same care. “I’m tired of this, Harry. Why are you still here?”

 

Harry opens his mouth to say what he always says, but it doesn’t fit properly. “I don’t know,” he admits.

 

“Then you should leave,” Louis tells him. “It’s not up for discussion. Please get out of my house. I will be sure to telephone your office should I need your assistance as an editor.”

 

“Louis.” Harry’s hands clench involuntarily as Louis pushes away from the doorframe with a wince. Harry does not move. Louis does not need to be helped, wouldn’t appreciate it even if he did.

 

“Pack your things, Harry. Do me the courtesy, please, of not making me ask you again.”

 

Harry drops his gaze. He doesn’t watch as Louis crosses the hall and makes for the stairs, but he is very tuned in to every sound. The sound of Louis making his way very slowly, painfully, up the stairs feels like the furthest from anyone that Harry’s ever been.


	11. Grow Up, and Blow Away

Harry chose his office because of the sunshine. There are huge, southern-facing windows that look out over the river, and the room is always warm. Harry has a particular chair located in a particular spot, and during the afternoons he curls up on it with a cup of hot water and lemon – lately it has occasionally been proper tea; Louis’ influence, no doubt – and reads manuscripts that have come in.

 

His assistant has very thoughtfully placed a stack on the table next to his chair, and he is skimming the top-most one – an obvious fantasy knock-off written to capitalize on the success of the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe a handful of years prior – when his telephone rings and shatters his comfortable silence.

 

Unwinding himself from his chair, Harry crosses the room in his stocking feet and fetches up the receiver the moment it has finished ringing for a second time.

 

“Hello?”

 

“Harry. Good.” Louis’ voice is instantly recognizable. “I had to ask the switchboard woman to put me through. I couldn’t remember your number, but she knew who you were.”

 

“You didn’t know my number,” Harry repeats.

 

“I’ve never rang it,” Louis points out.

 

“I gave you my card,” Harry says, and then nearly shoves his fist into his mouth because where he is leading this discussion is so incredibly not relevant.

 

“Yes, but I’ve obviously misplaced it, haven’t it? You’ve seen my house.” Louis sounds vaguely impatient, but also like he has come to expect these sorts of conversational detours with Harry. “Anyway. You’ve not rung me. I was assuming you would after you read the manuscript.”

 

Harry nearly lets too long of a silence elapse. “The manuscript?” he echoes.

 

“I mailed it over a fortnight ago,” Louis says. “Don’t tell me that you spent weeks harping on me to write it and now you’ve not even read it. Christ’s sake, you are the worse literary agent I’ve ever met.”

 

“I think I’m probably the only literary agent you haven’t bodily thrown off of your property,” Harry says helpfully, and when Louis doesn’t immediately respond, Harry knows he’s right and continues: “Just give me a minute, yeah? I’ll just – don’t hang up.”

 

Harry sets the receiver down carefully on the desk, and then springs into action. He digs through the stack of manuscripts next to the chair, scattering them across the carpet, but there is no sign of anything with Louis’ name on it.

 

Hurrying into the front room where his assistant works part-time – she is off today, which Harry is a little grateful for because he is in the mood to harangue her about where Louis’ book could be and she doubtless doesn’t deserve it – Harry begins rifling through drawers.

 

Frustrated, he returns to the phone. “Is this a trick? Are you telling me you’ve mailed it so that I won’t ask you for it?”

 

“Of course it’s not a trick. Do you honestly think I would go through the trouble? I would just tell you to fuck off.” There is a definite note of annoyance in Louis’ tone now. “There’s only the one copy. Find it, call me back.”

 

He hangs up.

 

Now Harry is genuinely concerned. He returns to the front room and begins rooting around in their files in earnest, setting things aside and then putting them away again in the proper order automatically. Straightening, he buries his fingers in his hair, palm pressed to his forehead, and turns in a full circle in the middle of the room. Where is it?

 

He is about to give it and call his assistant on her day off when a corner of brown paper catches his eye from the other room. Harry goes through at once and brushes two or three sheets of paper off the top of a neatly-wrapped package that he can tell already is a thick sheaf of typewritten paper.

 

_It was sitting on my desk,_ he thinks, lifting his eyes to the Heavens for a moment to seriously question his sanity. He will certainly have to come up with a better story for Louis than that.

 

Opening the package with care, he sets aside the paper and, leaning against his desk, takes in the bundle of paper in his hands. It has been nearly four months since last he saw Louis in person. He has been busy, or maybe he was always writing and never bothered to fill Harry in, out of – spite, perhaps. The latter would not surprise Harry at all.

 

Harry turns it over and finds a note tucked into the string that holds the bundle together. The note is in Louis’ sharp, surprisingly tidy writing.

 

_Show Liam._

_-Louis_

Harry brews himself an entire pot of tea this time, spreads a throw blanket over his knees, and sits down to read. 

 

It had been strange, hearing Louis' voice over the phone again after so long. It is almost a different kind of surreal to read it. 

 

-

 

The flat that Liam lives in is just off the estate, above the post office. Harry tilts his head back to look up at the two windows that belong to him and takes in the shape of the building. The Victorian chimneys, long out of use, stand stark against the sky.

 

Going around to the side door, Harry presses the buzzer and waits, gloved hands clasped behind his back.

 

When Liam leans out the window above, Harry feels a very familiar sense of deja-vu.

 

“Who’s that?” Liam asks, shading his eyes.

 

“It’s Harry Styles. I’ve, uh… I’ve come to show you something. Is it alright if I come up?”

 

Liam gives it a moment’s thought, apparently unable to come up with a good enough reason why not. “Yes, alright.”

 

He disappears from the window, and moments later, the buzzer sounds. Harry lets himself and climbs a flight of stairs that have seen better days, their surface peeled away as though someone at some point had intended on replacing the wood but then never completed the job.

 

“Sorry,” Liam says, opening the door as Harry reaches the top of the stairs. “They’re – renovating. In the meantime, I get my rent a bit cheaper. Come in.”

 

Harry steps inside, removing his gloves, scarf, hat, and jacket. Liam takes each one and puts it carefully aside on a well-worn but well-cared-for armchair.

 

The apartment is just two rooms, one of which is a toilet.  

 

“Would you like some tea?” Liam asks. He does not seem to be ashamed of his surroundings, and that, oddly, relaxes Harry.

 

“Yes, please. May I sit?”

 

“Yes, of course. Go on.”

 

Harry sits down at the kitchen table and clasps his hands on the gnarled wood. “It smells nice in here.”

 

“Thanks.” Liam glances over his shoulder at him as he puts the kettle on. “I cook loads now. Got tired of going down to the chippy all the time. Anyway, it’s not that hard, is it? And it’s not as though I’ve got a wife to do it.”

 

“You keep it very tidy in here, too,” Harry says approvingly.

 

“Yes, well. I haven’t got a wife, but there is – someone. She’s very nice, met her at church. She comes for Sunday dinner, sometimes.”

 

“That’s lovely,” Harry says, and means it.

 

Liam smiles. “It is, a bit. I felt like I had to be alone for a long while, but I don’t really like it. Being alone, I mean.”

 

Harry doesn’t really think that Louis likes being alone either, but mentioning to Liam that he and Louis are more alike than either of them think is doubtless going to cause some kind of row.

 

Liam brings two steaming mugs of tea over, sets them on the table, and then returns to the cupboard for biscuits.

 

“Was it the factory that you work at?” Harry asks. “I saw it driving in, I think.”

 

“Yes, you would have,” Liam agrees. “That’s where I worked before the war, as well. And my dad, my uncles, the whole lot. Nice to have a cup of hot tea on a cold day, isn’t it?” He takes up the seat across from Harry’s and clasps his hands loosely around his mug. “So what brings you here, then?”

 

Harry takes a deep breath. “I know that you didn’t want Louis to write another book.”

 

Liam looks like he expected something along these lines, but he maintains his polite tone of voice, even as his eyes drop to his tea. “No, I didn’t. He’s well aware of my feelings on the matter. He was before he wrote the first book.”

 

“I know.” Harry watches him. “The thing is, he has written the book. And… he wanted me to show it to you.”

 

“I knew he would write it anyway.” Liam is wholly invested in the contents of his tea cup now, shoulders a little hunched. It’s an odd look on a man his size. “Louis does what he pleases. Always has. I just wanted to… I don’t know. Make sure he knew that I still felt the way I did. And part of me, I reckon, just wanted to see him again. Stupid.”

 

Harry’s brow dips in the middle. “I think it matters, when you tell Louis how you feel. It matters to him. I, um. I made you a copy. I’ve got it here, in my bag. But he wanted me to tell you how it ends, I think.”

 

Liam’s expression is startled and openly wounded as he looks up. “I know how it ends.”

 

Harry shakes his head. “Not this version, I don’t think.”

 

-

 

The outside of Louis’ house is somehow slightly more presentable than the last time Harry saw it. Perhaps it is simply because the sunshine is so bright – but as he grows closer, he can see that the paint has been sanded away from the formerly-peeling windowsills on the ground level, and the rotted sections of the porch have been replaced.

 

“Oi.”

 

Harry turns at the sound of Louis’ voice, and comes around the side of the house to see him kneeling next to a paint can.

 

“Is it comfortable to sit like that?” Harry asks.

 

“It’s great, actually,” Louis tells him. “Mind, it’s a struggle to get down and even worse to get up, but the silver lining is that I get a lot of work done while I’m down here.”

 

“Do you want a hand?” Harry approaches and reaches for Louis’ cane, which is leaning against the side of the house.

 

“If you can hand me that, I can do it on my own,” Louis says firmly, and Harry does as he is told. Louis gets one foot under himself, and then leans heavily on the stick as he pushes himself to his feet. Harry is a little bit concerned as he starts off across the garden with a pronounced limp, but it seems to work itself loose by the time he gains the stairs.

 

“Tea?” Louis asks.

 

“Yes, but I can fetch it,” Harry says. “I know the way.”

 

“I was fully intending on having you fetch the tea, Harry,” Louis says, easing himself down onto the top step.

 

That isn’t anything remotely resembling an apology, but it feels like one, anyway. Or at least, it feels like Louis is not still in the kind of mood to demand that Harry leave his house, which Harry rather appreciates.

 

When he returns with the tea, Louis is leaning against the railing, weight off of his bad hip. He has his eyes closed in the sunshine, but he opens them a slit to mark out where his tea is and take up the cup.

 

“I did tell you to call when you found my book,” Louis says.

 

“I know. But I thought I would come out here. Are you comfortable? Do you want a cushion?”

 

Louis shakes his head. “Believe it or not, hard surfaces are better. Sometimes. Did you read it?”

 

Harry laughs. “Did I read it?”

 

Louis shoots him a look through cracked eyelids. “I’m only asking because you seemed to have misplaced it rather quickly after haranguing me for ages about getting it to you.”

 

“I read it,” Harry says firmly. “And… I got your note.”

 

“Ah.” Louis does not immediately follow this up with anything, instead filling the silence by taking a long sip of his tea. Harry will never know how he drinks it so hot.

 

“I went to Wolverhampton,” Harry says. “I went to his flat.”

 

“Did you show it to him?” Louis asks. His voice has an odd turn in it, like he is not sure if he wants to know the answer after all. “Did he say anything?”

 

Harry hesitates. “I told him how it ended,” he says.

 

He had told Liam what Louis had written, of course, and Harry can still remember the way Liam had stared at him, at a total loss, for a long minute. Whatever he had wanted from Louis, it had not been that.

 

“Louis, I don’t think…”

 

But Louis does not let him finish. Perhaps he anticipates what Harry will say, because he sits up straighter. “Liam deserves a happy ending.”

 

Harry sighs. “What about you?”

 

The day is bright and quiet, but for the singing of the birds. Even so, Harry can read the war in Louis’ body, the calculated stillness of his shoulders. “I don’t deserve anything.”

 

“Shut up,” Harry says, startling even himself with the suddenness of it. “You listen. Liam doesn’t want this ending.”

 

“Of course he wants that ending,” Louis says flatly. “Liam was fucking in love with him and he’s dead because of me.”

 

Harry stops. “Liam was – ”

 

“Of course he was.” Louis doesn’t let Harry get to the end of his question, and Harry can only sit back at the sheer pressure of his voice. “We didn’t talk about it, did we? Because you don’t talk about that sort of thing. It happened in the army, obviously; you don’t put that many humans together in an awful environment and expect them not to turn to each other. But most of the time it was just that, just a battlefield thing. But with Liam it wasn’t. Liam was in love with Zayn, and if I were dead then Zayn wouldn’t be.”

 

In the silence that follows, Louis’ shoulders slump a little, and he wraps both hands around his tea cup. He does not look at Harry.

 

Eventually, it is Harry who speaks. “Liam wanted to keep that copy that I made,” he says. “And I let him. I thought you would want him to have it. But that’s not the version that he wants you to publish.”

 

Louis does not reply, but his expression is a map of conflict.

 

Harry carries on, because he does not know what the next outburst will be yet but there are things that he hasn’t managed to fit in, and Louis likes to end his outbursts in a spectacular way. If Harry doesn’t say it now, he might not get the chance. “Liam doesn’t want you to be dead. He says that… if you think that he would trade you for Zayn, he wouldn’t.”

 

Louis makes a quiet noise and presses his palm to his forehead, so softly, like it hurts.

 

“He says that he’s grateful for that ending, because he always wanted to imagine it like that and you were always a better storyteller than he was. But that’s not the ending that should be published, because it’s not the truth.”

 

Louis tucks his head down so that his hand covers one eye. The other is closed. His breath rattles a little when it comes out.

 

Harry feels, strangely, like his own eyes are prickling at the backs.

 

“It’s up to you, of course,” he says. “You’re the writer. Only, you wanted me to show it to Liam, so I did. And I thought you would want to know how he felt.”

 

Louis does not say anything.

 

Harry finishes his tea and pretends that he is not invading Louis’ space, though he knows he is. The problem is that he is not sure how to leave without also hurting Louis’ pride, and he believes that would be worse, somehow. So he stays, and looks anywhere but to his right.


	12. Training Jasmine How to Vine/Up the Arbor to Your Door

Liam has a hat crumpled in his hands with Louis opens the door. Having not been expecting him, Louis simply stands there for a moment and waits.

 

“I didn’t call ahead,” Liam says, after a long moment during which he, too, is reluctant to be the first to speak. “Because I wasn’t sure if you’d want me to come.”

 

“Ah, yes, the good old ‘Louis doesn’t want to see me, so I came anyway’,” Louis remarks drily.

 

Summer has come and gone, and the wind stirs up the leaves that have collected at the bottom of the porch steps, warning of winter. The leaves rustle against one another but do not move, trapped by their circumstances.

 

 “Can I come in?” Liam asks.

 

“Funny,” Louis says, eyeing him. “You’re much less sure of yourself than you were the last time.”

 

“Is it this hard for you to stop taking the mick for one single minute?” Liam demands.

 

Louis sighs. “I suppose not. Come in.” Stepping aside, he allows Liam into the passage ahead of him. “Put the kettle on when you get there,” he instructs, and Liam walks into the kitchen and does so.

 

“I finished reading your book,” Liam says, his back to Louis.

 

Louis studies him, but finds no answers in the shape of his shoulders or lines of his back. “I know. Harry told me how you felt about the ending.”

 

“No, well – he told me the ending,” Liam says, opening the wrong cupboard for cups before he finds the right one and fetches two down. “But I didn’t finish reading it until now. It took me awhile, to work myself up to it.”

 

Louis leans against the edge of the table. “And?”

 

“I stand by what I said,” Liam tells him. “I know that Harry told you that I wanted you to publish the real ending, the way it really happened. And I still want that.”

 

Louis can’t help the question that tumbles out: “Why?”

 

“Because you being dead isn’t a good ending, either,” Liam says. He turns around slowly, and then rests his weight against the edge of the countertop as he waits for the kettle to boil. He looks tired. “You’re my friend.”

 

“Not like he was,” Louis says.

 

Liam shakes his head, but something tightens in his face and he looks a little determined when he says, “It’s not your fault he’s dead.”

 

Louis makes a derisive noise.

 

“Don’t you do that.” Liam isn’t looking directly at him, but he still has that determined look. He is also a little pale, and Louis wonders what it must take for someone like Liam, who does not get easily emotional anymore, to go back to the person he was before the war made him hard. “Zayn made a choice. You didn’t make a mistake and get him killed. He decided to do his best to save his best mate, and he – it was bad luck.”

 

Louis starts to shake his head. “Come on, Liam, it wasn’t d –  ”

 

“It was!” Liam does look up at him now. “It was luck. Do you know how many men died that day? Thousands of soldiers. It could’ve been you, or me. It could’ve been all of us. Zayn did a good thing, and it was a good thing that was his choice. Don’t take that away from him.”

 

Louis falls silent for a long moment. “It’s really hard to…”

 

He does not finish his sentence. _It’s really hard to be alive instead of someone else._ He will never be able to say if Zayn made the right choice or not, or whether Zayn’s life would have ultimately been more valuable than his. He has always assumed that it would have been, but some of that, he knows, is the guilt.

 

“I know,” Liam says. “But we just – we have to. What is the point of us being here if we don’t?”

 

“Don’t what?” Louis asks.

 

“Live.” Liam reaches out and moves the whistling kettle from the hob without looking at it. “I know you’ve been repairing the house. It looks better than the last time I was here.”

 

“Yes.” Louis cocks his head. “Is that living? That qualifies?”

 

“Yeah.” Liam is very firm about that. “Because it means that you’re doing something for yourself. That you think you matter enough to live in a nice house. That you’re investing in your future. That you still want to be here in a few years to enjoy this house.”

 

“I was never planning on not being here in a few years,” Louis says at once. “That’s not the sort of person I am.”

 

“You drank yourself unconscious almost every day I was here, when I came.” Liam’s gaze is very direct, and it makes Louis uncomfortable enough to look away, even though he does not want to concede the ground. “Are you telling me that that wasn’t a habit? That’s not putting a gun in your mouth, but it’s not what you do when you want to live.”

 

Louis’ jaw clenches tightly, but he does not speak.

 

“I forgive you,” Liam says, and that makes Louis’ head snap up in surprise. “I don’t know if you needed me to say that to you, but if you did, then I do. I never blamed you for what happened to him. Maybe at first I was finding it hard to cope, but if you felt like I was taking it out on you – I didn’t mean to.”

 

There is a beat. “You never said anything,” Louis says. “I just assumed you did.”

 

“Maybe you assumed I blamed you because you blamed yourself,” Liam tells him, all pretenses stripped away. “You didn’t answer my letters. I took that – not in the way you meant it, I think.”

 

“I couldn’t face it, mate,” Louis says, his voice quieter now than it was before. “Couldn’t face you. Not after what happened. I know how you felt about Zayn.”

 

“I regret not – making it clearer.” Liam has never admitted to Louis his real feelings; Louis does not think that Liam has ever told anyone. But he does not seem to be afraid to do it now. “I should have told him. He might not have wanted that from me, but at least he would have known.”

 

“Ah, Liam…” Louis feels a rawness in the back of his throat that he hasn’t felt in a long time. “We both know he would’ve been kind about it, even if he hadn’t wanted it. But I think he… might have felt a little like that, too.”

 

Liam’s smile looks like it hurts him. He turns away from Louis again, to busy himself with the fixings of the tea, and Louis does not think his eyes are dry. “I suppose we’ll never know, will we?”

 

“You’ve seen that picture in my study, yeah?” Louis nods slowly. “Yeah, mate. I think we can be pretty sure.”

 

“It doesn’t matter,” Liam says, “because we never could’ve – no one would’ve ever understood.”

 

“It does matter. My God, Liam. When you – you, Liam, when you specifically – love a thing, you love it so fiercely and completely that it has to be like – being at the center of a very warm, very bright universe. Just because it wasn’t me in that center doesn’t mean I couldn’t see it. And if I could see it… well, Zayn was lucky. He knew it. You could tell he knew it every time he looked at you. Yeah? Turn around, come here a minute.”

 

Liam hesitates, and when he does turn around, he keeps his head lowered. Louis limps slowly across to him and draws him into a hug. Liam does not pull away.

 

“You’re an idiot,” Louis tells him softly.

 

Liam makes a funny little sound.

 

“Of course it matters that you loved him. I knew you still did when I saw you the last time. That’s why I wrote the second book. I wanted you to have the right ending.”

 

“Not the right ending,” Liam says, his voice a little thick.

 

“Alright, then. But an ending that could’ve happened. And I reckon you would’ve been happier.”

 

Liam does not reply, and Louis thinks that this will always exist between them – Zayn’s sacrifice, and what it meant for both of them. But it feels lighter now, and Louis thinks it will be easier to carry going forward.

 

“Thank you for coming,” Louis tells him, as he releases him.

 

Liam’s eyes are a little red, and he hurriedly wipes at them. “Is that it? Are you kicking me out?”

 

“No,” Louis says, and the thought startles a laugh out of him. “Yes, I’m kicking you out, you knob. That makes perfect sense.”

 

Liam has the grace to look a little embarrassed. Louis shakes his head at him, amused.

 

“Finish making that tea and bring it into the study. I’ve got the good whiskey in there.” He turns and makes for the hallway, knowing that it will take him longer to get there, but Liam will follow. “I had to hide it, you know,” he continues, over his shoulder. “When Harry was about tidying all day, he would dump out some of my bottles when he thought I wasn’t looking.”

 

“Are you still drinking a lot?” Liam asks, as he follows with the steaming tea mugs.

 

“Not as often,” Louis replies, and it feels like an honest answer. “I still do at night, or I can’t sleep. That is what it is, I’m afraid. But I’ve been getting up to a lot more during the day.”

 

“Good.”

 

“’Good’. Listen to you.” Louis likes this patter, finding it totally comfortable to immerse himself in it like he last did it only yesterday. “Still acting like my mum.”

 

“Well, if you didn’t need so much minding,” Liam retorts.

 

Before they sit down, Liam takes the photo down from the mantelpiece and sets it on the low table between the chairs, more easily visible, and more in the thick of things.  Louis thinks he will leave it there.

 

-

 

Harry has his head turned, speaking over his shoulder to his assistant as he walks out the door. That is why he can firmly vouch afterwards that he had first detected Louis’ presence by his smell. It is an odd mix of off-brand soap, cigarettes, and maybe a hint of gin, but much less than Harry is used to. There is also an undefined quality that reminds Harry of the inside of Louis’ house, old wood and a little bit of dust.

 

Louis wears it well, but it is completely incongruous in Harry’s current surroundings. And it is why, when Harry turns, he only just manages to catch himself before he walks directly into him.

 

“Steady on.” Louis places a brief hand on Harry’s shoulder. “Do you always wander about, not watching where you’re going?”

 

“Only here in town, where there are loads of people I could walk into,” Harry replies. “And I can say without hesitation that I was certainly not expecting you to be directly outside of my office door.”

 

“Aye, well. I was in town to pick up some more quarter-inch screws – as you do – stop nodding like you know what a quarter-inch screw is – and you’re the only one I tolerate, generally.” Louis says it completely unaffectedly, which is probably one of the reasons why Harry likes him so much; it’s because Louis likes him, too.

 

“I don’t think I ever expected a social call from you,” Harry admits.

 

“Don’t ruin it by talking about it,” Louis warns. “Anyway, it’s not entirely social. I was sort of curious as to what you’ve decided to do with my book.”

 

Harry hesitates. “Do you want to walk with me, a bit? I’ve got to go and fetch some office supplies, down the shop.”

 

“Yeah, alright.” Louis is eyeing him curiously, but he falls into step next to Harry and lets him dictate the pace of the conversation.

 

“So, obviously, it’s excellent,” Harry begins.

 

Louis’ eyes narrow, but he laughs. “Is this the rejection speech? I don’t need it, Harry. Just tell me you don’t want to publish it.”

 

“Don’t be stupid,” Harry says at once. “I do want to publish it. It’s very good. I will admit that I… perhaps had a bit of a cry, toward the end.”

 

“But.” Louis is still watching him, looking amused but not irritated.

 

“It feels… I don’t know. Maybe because I know you now, and I know – Liam, and all. It feels very personal to me in a way that the first one didn’t. So I sort of wanted to keep it to myself for a while, just until I decide how I properly feel about publishing it.”

 

Louis nods slowly. “Alright, then. But so you know, I’ve already started working on something else, so if you don’t get that one out the door soon, there’ll be a whole backlog.”

 

Harry gives a whimsical little shrug. “How do you know I’d publish anything else you wrote?”

 

Louis’ mouth falls open. “Cheeky.”

 

“It could be rubbish,” Harry points out, solemn-faced.

 

“Oh, it definitely will be now,” Louis says. “And I expect you to sell the hell out of it. Do your job.”

 

“You’ll have to submit a manuscript, just like everyone else.”

 

“Not if you’re going to scribble all over it.”

 

Harry looks offended. “They’re not scribbles! They’re notes!”

 

“I threw them in the fire, the first time.”

 

“Well, I know you did, because I had to make all the edits myself,” Harry says, a bit ruefully. Louis laughs at him.

 

“What’s the new book about, anyway?” Harry asks.

 

“You’ll see,” Louis says, and Harry thinks he detects a faint note of teasing. “It’s not based on real life, this one. Figured it was probably for the best, since the last one got me into so much trouble.”

 

“You’re in a very good mood,” Harry marvels.

 

“I’m having fewer one-sided conversations these days,” Louis says. “I will, however, go to the grave not admitting that you were right about that.”

 

“That’s alright,” Harry says. “I’ll know.”

 

-

 

When Harry comes to visit the following week, it feels like the first time that he has made what he would officially term a social visit to the house. Louis is certainly less defensive than any time that Harry has visited before; indeed, Harry would almost call him sociable as he goes through the – by now – very familiar motions of brewing tea in his kitchen.

 

“Did you come to talk about the book?” Louis asks, a good half hour into their conversation about nothing in particular.

 

“No,” Harry says, not surprised so much by the question but by the timing. He had forgotten that they had not done the customary state-your-purpose dance that came at the beginning of a usual social call, especially ones that featured a suspicious Louis. “I just came to talk.”

 

Louis accepts that after only half a beat during which his eyes narrow and he searches Harry’s face.

 

One of the things that Harry comes to enjoy about visiting Louis’ place is that the calls for lunch or a cup of tea can easily turn into longer visits, since Harry is so accustomed to being in Louis’ house. He will simply get up mid-conversation, once the light has started to dim in the room, and begin making dinner. It does not feel contrived or intrusive, the way it might with someone else. Often, he will bring his own ingredients, a habit upon which Louis does not comment but certainly notices.

 

“I have to bring my own groceries,” Harry tells him at one point. He has put Louis to work chopping onions, but Louis is both very slow – which Harry suspects is on purpose – and very bad at chopping – which may not be – so it’s really just something for Louis to do more than anything. “You never have anything but biscuits and milk.”

 

“The biscuits are for eating and the milk is for the tea,” Louis says, as though Harry is the stupid one for suggesting that owning a vegetable or a potato might be an idea.

 

The week before Louis’ birthday – which Louis has not mentioned, but Harry knows because he makes it his business to know the birthdays of his clients so that he can send them gift baskets – Harry comes to the house with large box.

 

“What on earth is that?” Louis asks, backing out of the way to let Harry bring it inside and set it on the table, beaming.

 

“Open it,” Harry urges.

 

“Is it a hat?” Louis asks. It is clearly not a hat. “I own so many.”

 

“No,” Harry says, refusing to be drawn in.

 

“Well, it can’t be a kitten; you’ve forgotten to poke any holes in the top.”

 

“Will you open it!” Harry is amused, but he maintains a straight face for his own benefit more than anything.

 

Louis eyes him, but obligingly he fetches a pair of scissors and cuts away the tape, pulling the paper off the outside of the box.

 

“It’s a kettle,” he says, noting the photo on the side of the box. “Harry, I already own a kettle. Quite a good one, as it happens.”

 

“Your kettle is nearly rusted out in the bottom,” Harry informs him. “And anyway, open the box properly. It’s not an ordinary kettle.”

 

Louis pulls open the cardboard and fetches out the shiny new appliance, setting it on the table.

 

“It shuts off automatically,” Harry says, unable to contain himself any longer.

 

“It does what?” Louis asks.

 

“Once it’s begun to boil. You don’t have to wait about and take it off the hob before it whistles your house down around your ears. It just shuts off on its own.”

 

Louis stares at Harry, and then at the kettle. “You’re having me on.”

 

“No.” Harry looks extremely pleased with himself. “They’ve just come out with it. I thought, if anyone could use one of these, it’s you. It’s all electric as well, obviously, so you can just plug it into the wall.”

 

Louis looks dubious, but Harry is obviously so enthusiastic that he reluctantly picks up the kettle and takes it over to the sink to fill it.

 

“And what do I do now? Just plug it in?”

 

“Yeah, I think you – like that, yes. You plug it in, and then you press that button.” Harry can’t contain himself, and he comes over to help Louis set it up on the counter.

 

Then, like two children, they stand in front of it expectantly and wait.

 

“I feel like an idiot,” Louis mutters. “Watching the pot boil.”

 

“Well, we’ve got to watch it, haven’t we?” Harry asks. “Or else how will we know it works?”

 

Louis tilts his head in the sense of _yeah, fair point_ , but he still does not look sold.

 

A few minutes later, during which Louis has taken to sighing and shifting his weight, the water inside of the kettle begins to bubble up.

 

“That was fast,” Louis remarks, surprised despite himself.

 

“The electric ones are nearly twice as quick,” Harry says at once, keen to sell Louis on his gift. “They use less power. I’ve had one for ages, it’s top notch.”

 

Louis nods, and, even as he looks on, the kettle shuts itself off as the water starts to properly boil.

 

“Well, would you look at that,” he marvels.

 

Harry looks very, very pleased.

 

He only learns much later that Louis only uses the electric kettle when Harry is there. Otherwise, he clings to his old-fashioned stove-top kettle, perhaps because he has gotten so used to it. He never mentions this to Harry, and Harry never tells him that he knows that Louis only uses his gift to humour him. He only even notices when he spots Louis’ kettle on the stove top one day, and his own tucked back in a cupboard after a longer span than usual has passed between their visits.

 

 After his initial twinge of hurt, he thinks that perhaps he should view it as sweet.

 

The following week is, of course, Christmas, and Harry goes home to visit his mother and sister. He does not ask Louis about his plans, but he has the local butcher deliver a ham on Christmas day (though the delivery charge is rather high, given the date and how far out Louis lives).

 

Louis thanks Harry for the ham the next time he sees him, but he quite pointedly has a cheese basket delivered to Harry’s office the week after New Years.

 

When Harry comes to call at the end of January with a book on gardening and a few packets of seeds – “Never too early to start planning for spring,” he says cheerfully – Louis finally brings it up.

 

“You don’t need an excuse to come here, you know,” he tells Harry, as they sit kitty-corner to one another on the worn but comfortable chairs in the study.

 

“An excuse?” Harry echoes, surprised. It is not that he is being deliberately obtuse; he had not recognized it in his own behaviour.

 

“Yes. You can just come. You know I hardly ever have anything on, and I don’t generally like visitors. You’re the exception, after an absolutely superfluous amount of effort on your part.”

 

“Well, I am pleased about that,” Harry admits, with a bit of a grin.

 

“Of course you are, you strange, curly man.” Louis shakes his head. “Gardening, of all the bloody things in the world. Why on earth?”

 

“Well, you’ve been doing loads of repairs, haven’t you?” Harry asks. “Outside, especially, in the summer. So I thought it might be nice to get the garden going as well. Do the whole house up proper.”

 

Louis raises an eyebrow at him. “Do you like gardening, Harry?”

 

Harry nods. “Of course.”

 

“Well, then, I’ll leave that to you,” Louis tells him. “You can plant whatever you’d like. I reckon… might be nice to do some vegetables, along the back wall.”

 

“Then vegetables it is,” Harry says, as usual, quick to seize on anything that Louis approves of that seems like it might provide an improvement to his health or well-being. “Do you like tomatoes?”

 

The next time Harry visits, even though Louis has told him that he doesn’t need to bring anything, he brings something anyway. It is a book on tanks in the First World War, which Harry thinks that Louis will find interesting. It is the principle of the thing, of course. Louis takes the book from him and gives him a look, but does not say anything.

 

The next time Harry visits after that, he comes empty-handed.


	13. Carry Me Today; I'll Carry You Forever

It is well into spring the day that Harry turns up on Louis’ doorstep with champagne.

 

Louis, as it turns out, is not inside; he comes stumping around the side of the house with dirt on his knees and a crescent wrench in one hand.

 

“I’m not a plumber,” he informs Harry, which is all of the story that Harry is likely to get out of him. His eyes flick to the bottle. “What’s that?”

 

“Your book sold its first half a million,” Harry says, unable to contain his grin. He had been grinning all the way out in the car, actually, all of the windows open and the music turned up loud.

 

Both of Louis’ eyebrows rise. “Oh, aye?” His mouth pulls up in the middle, apparently approving, and he waves the wrench at Harry. “Back in a minute.”

 

By the time he comes into the house, Harry has poured the champagne into two glasses.

 

“Did you bring those out, too?” Louis asks, amused.

 

“Well, I wasn’t about to drink champagne from a mug or a water glass,” Harry says loftily, passing Louis his glass. “To your success.”

 

“Ours,” Louis corrects, tipping his glass in Harry’s direction. “Cheers.”

 

For all the times that Louis has been drunk in Harry’s presence, Harry has not once touched more than a single drink in his. When the bottle of champagne is finished, Harry has the right kind of pleasant buzz behind his eyes, though – enough to decide to throw caution to the wind and accept when Louis offers him a tumbler with gin in it.

 

“Well, this is a change, isn’t it?” Louis asks, once they are comfortably settled in the study, the bottle sat next to Louis’ chair with the light from the fire casting its contents in shadow.

 

“What is?” Harry asks. He feels very warm but not unpleasantly so, watching the shadows play on the walls.

 

“This. You, deciding that you don’t need to be the responsible one, for a change.”

 

“Hey.” Harry lifts his head to knit his brows at Louis. “It wasn’t that I wasn’t drinking to be the responsible one.”

 

“It’s alright, Harry. I know what I’m like when I’m in a state.” Harry is very nearly positive that Louis is taking the mickey out of him when he adds: “And anyway, you couldn’t very well give me all of those disappointed looks about my habit if you were tossing them back as well.”

 

“Shut up,” Harry says, letting his head fall back. “I just want you to be happy. Wanted you to be safe. And anyway, I’ve only ever really drank with friends.”

 

Louis turns his glass around in his hand, eyeing Harry curiously. “Is that what we are now? Friends?”

 

Harry nods slowly. “I’d say so, yes.”

 

“Well, whatever it is, I don’t mind this. It’s nice to have a reason to have a few drinks that doesn’t make me feel so… guilty.”

 

Harry stiffens slightly. “I didn’t mean to make you feel guilty.”

 

“No, pet, you didn’t,” Louis reassures him. “It’s just how I am. If I’m not feeling guilty for one thing, it’s the other, isn’t it? I just meant, it’s nice to have something to celebrate rather than just using drink as a way of dealing with pain.”

 

Harry relaxes and stares into the fire for a long moment.

 

“Louis,” he says eventually. “Why haven’t you got a wife?”

 

Louis snorts. “Because I’d be a terrible husband. Is that even a serious question? Why haven’t _you_ got a wife?”

 

Harry sort of works his way into a meandering kind of shrug. “I mean… I’m not sure. Could just be that there was never a good one. Never one I wanted.”

 

“Yeah, could be,” Louis agrees. “That’s as good an answer as any.”

 

A silence elapses between them again, longer than before, but no less comfortable.

 

Harry eventually becomes aware of Louis rising slowly from his chair. “Going to fetch the other bottle,” Louis tells him, before Harry even has to crack an eyelid. “There’s a very good bottle of scotch in the desk drawer, unless I’ve done one of my things where I’ve drank it all and forgotten.”

 

Harry smiles, eyes closed. “Louis.”

 

Louis stops moving. “Yes?”

 

“Come here a minute.”

 

A beat passes, and then Louis turns, very purposefully, and uses the back of the chair as guidance as he makes his way over to where Harry sits with his head tilted back.

 

Harry is not entirely sure what his aim is, but he reaches out and catches Louis’ shirt on the second try. “Closer,” he says.

 

It is strange, then, that, having no expectations, he experiences a very real jolt of shock when Louis leans down and kisses him.

 

Harry’s eyes fly open at once, and he surges to his feet. Louis has already stepped back, not fleeing, exactly, but certainly closing off behind his eyes as he watches Harry’s face for clues.

 

“You said you wanted me to be happy,” Louis says, and he is still in Harry’s space, still close enough that Harry can’t quite tell the colour of his eyes, but he has stopped. He is waiting, Harry knows.

 

“I do want you to be happy,” Harry replies. He instinctively reaches out, sliding his palm along Louis’ jaw until his fingers are buried in the soft hair at the base of his skull.

 

“Do you not want this?” Louis asks, not moving, letting Harry touch him without acknowledging it. “You don’t have to say yes.”

 

Harry hesitates. He doesn’t recognize every single emotion he’s swimming in right now, knows that the two in biggest competition are his desire and his fear. “No,” he says finally. “You read it right.”

 

“Then kiss me,” Louis says. “I’m not going to keep pushing. If you want me, do something about it.”

 

Harry does not move. He is not sure how long the moment is that passes between them, as they gaze at one another, but he is extremely conscious of when it breaks. Louis ends the eye contact between them a split second before he turns away, and Harry has enough time to jerk his hand back.

 

“Fuck’s sake, Harry.” Louis’ voice is quiet, and he is irritated but that is not the predominant strain in his voice. Instead, Harry thinks he hears disappointment. Louis moves away from him, across the room to where he left the bottle they had abandoned moments before.

 

“Louis,” Harry says, and his voice pulls at his throat, comes out a little scratchy.

 

“Look.” Louis turns around, leaning on the edge of the desk, the bottle held tightly in his fist and resting on his thigh. “I don’t need you to say that you love me. I don’t need you to feel that, either, I don’t – _need_ an investment from you. But you – are one of the only people I trust. You’ve seen my body, and you don’t get that pitying look that doctors get – or worse, revulsion.”

 

Harry swallows. “It’s not – you’re not revolting. I couldn’t feel that way about you.”

 

“And you know that I’m not always alright.” Louis waves the bottle. “That I drink too much, that I drive people away, that I’m too stubborn to change. And you’re not going to expect me to marry you at the end of it.”

 

“I know,” Harry says. “I know all of that.”

 

“Then?”

 

Harry knows that he must make a decision now, and that whatever decision he makes will be permanent and irrevocable. Louis has not said the obvious, that they are alone and that Louis does not keep a lot of company ever and that no one will ever know, even though those things are true. He has not said that if Harry says no, that Louis will never broach the topic again and that he will likely withdraw from Harry somewhat, though Harry recognizes that that would likely be the case. And he has not said what a yes would mean, whether a yes is just a yes for tonight or whether they would carry on this way.

 

But Harry knows what his answer has to be.

 

“Put the bottle down,” Harry says. “I don’t want you to be drunk.”

 

“A bit late for that, pet,” Louis tells him with a wry look – Harry knows that he himself is drunker than Louis is, and that Louis knows it too – but he does as Harry has requested, and sets the bottle aside.

 

Harry approaches slowly, letting Louis track his motions in the firelight.

 

When he reaches him, Louis does not stand. He allows Harry to lean down over him where he rests against the desk and brush his lips against his. As soon as he does, Louis presses up into it, capturing Harry’s mouth and kissing him like he had meant to the first time, before Harry pushed him away.

 

Harry is grateful for how much less this seems to paralyze Louis. Harry can only kiss him, a little helplessly, but Louis is the one who buries a hand in Harry’s hair and uses the other one to catch Harry’s hand and use him as leverage to pull himself upright. He guides Harry backward to the thick rug in front of the fireplace and breaks the kiss long enough to clear the couch of cushions, tossing them onto the floor.

 

Harry gets down on one knee without even having to be instructed, and Louis grips Harry’s hand hard as he shakily kneels. There is a half-moment that bypasses them before Harry realizes that Louis wants to direct this, so he lets himself gently down onto his back and lets Louis ease himself down, too, bracing his arms on the carpet on either side of Harry’s head and deepening the kiss almost immediately. Harry opens up under him, and the last of his fear slips away.

 

When Louis pushes himself half-upright, Harry understands without needing to be told that the time is up on how long Louis can put weight on his injury like this, and that in order to even the playing field, Louis needs to be on his back. Harry does not help him until Louis is letting himself down with one elbow braced underneath him; that is when Harry grips his hand and helps him slow the pace of it.

 

When Harry kisses him, he is still gripping Louis’ hand between them. Louis gives it a tight squeeze, almost too hard, and Harry knows that Louis hates needing him like that but is trying to be grateful anyway.

 

Harry lets Louis undress him first, knowing why this is the order of things; Louis trusts him, but it is not quite enough. Louis needs to see all of the unbroken sections of Harry first, to make Harry more vulnerable than him while he strokes his shoulders and runs the palms of his hands up his ribs. Harry lets him do all of that and more, patient and content to kiss him and be touched while Louis explores.

 

When Harry removes Louis’ shirt, he does not find any opposition. Louis has a tattoo that Harry had noticed previously but never had the chance to get a good look at; he traces it now with his fingers, glancing up at Louis inquiringly.

 

“Seventy-eight,” he says. “The number of my squadron.”

 

Harry leans down to suck a gentle kiss into the skin. “Did it hurt?”

 

“I’d take it over having my skin ripped open by an explosion,” Louis says drily.

 

Harry lets him get away with the non-answer, making sure to be thorough in the way he tastes Louis’ skin before he unbuckles his belt. Despite the care Harry had taken to reassure and relax him, to take his time, Louis still stiffens a little as Harry helps him gently out of his trousers, and then the shorts underneath.

 

Harry is not sure what he was expecting, but the gnarled scar tissue that craters in under Louis’ hip bone is soft. It looks darker and rawer in the firelight, a shiny, deep aberration in the smoothness of Louis’ skin. When first he touches it, Louis freezes, as though Harry has touched him somewhere unthinkable and inappropriate, like being grabbed by a stranger on the street. Harry does not shy away, tracing it very thoroughly with his fingers, every striation and curve and wrinkle.

 

“You don’t have to touch it,” Louis tells him, and there’s a strange tightness in his voice that Harry hasn’t heard before. He has one arm crooked, resting his head on it so that he can watch Harry.

 

“I know.” Harry covers it with his hand, stroking his thumb over the jut of Louis’ hip bone. He does not believe that anyone has ever touched Louis there since the injury, other than his doctors. He suspects that even Louis does not touch it, if he can avoid it.

 

Louis is silent for a moment. Then: “The other side is nicer.”

 

Harry hums a sound that is neither agreement nor disagreement and leans down to replace his hand with a kiss. “This side is part of you, too.”

 

Louis sucks in a breath and lets it out. It shudders very faintly on both the inhale and the exhale. "Harry, you don't have to touch it to make a point."

 

“I wouldn’t do that to you,” Harry says, kissing it again but stilling his fingers as he looks up at Louis. “What I’m feeling – what I’ve felt since the first time I saw it – is that this is where your body decided to heal instead of giving up. This is proof that something tried to kill you but you decided not to die. So it’s not pretty. Courage isn’t always. I still like the look of it on you.”

 

Louis gives him a long look, during which Harry does not touch him.

 

“Didn’t you say you trusted me?” Harry asks quietly.

 

When at last Louis tilts his head back, adjusting his arm to make himself more comfortable, Harry knows that he has won a small victory.

 

-

 

The blanket that Harry tucks gently around Louis’ body is not because he needs it; Harry can already tell that Louis runs hot, and the fire, though it has died down, still gives off a very satisfying glow. But he knows that there will not be one single occasion when Louis becomes completely comfortable with the way Harry looks at his injury, and Harry knows that what happened tonight was enough, for now. Louis is more comfortable this way, and Harry tugs the blanket over once he is lying down, too, so that they are both messily tangled in it.

 

“Should I leave you my house when I die?” Louis asks, after they have been lying there in comfortable silence for a long few minutes.

 

“What?” Harry asks, startled. He turns his head to look at Louis, who is in turn staring pensively into the fire.

 

“I paid off this house because of the book you helped me publish,” Louis points out. “It’s a very nice house, but my sisters would never want to live here.”

 

“Why are we talking about this now?” Harry demands. “I’m comfortable and warm and you’re going on about dying.”

 

Louis turns his head to meet Harry’s gaze and grins. “Eventually, one of us is going to die – likely me, because of the drinking and the stubbornness. I’m only saying. Someone should have this house who appreciates it.”

 

“Well, do what you like, but don’t tell me about it,” Harry says impatiently. “You are the worst. This is terrible post-shag conversation. Is this how you’ve scared everyone else away?”

 

“Let’s be quite honest, Harry; there were hardly loads of people to scare away.” Louis is watching him now, still amused, but with a more precise cast to his gaze than before.

 

“I don’t want your house or your self-pity.”

 

Louis laughs at him. “Very well. I shan’t leave you either.”

 

Harry rolls onto his side, facing Louis. “Will we do this again?”

 

Louis quiets. “Do you want to?”

 

“Yeah, I want to.” Harry drops his gaze, reaching out with one hand to trace the gaps between Louis’ ribs.

 

“But,” Louis prompts.

 

“Well, I just – do you want to always do this?”

 

There is a beat of silence that lasts a half-breath too long. “The thing is, Harry,” Louis begins, “that I’m going to go ahead and assume that someone with your head of hair and decent income is going to find a wife someday soon. And once you do that, you won’t want this anymore. Or if you do, you won’t have time – and your wife wouldn’t appreciate it, anyway.”

 

Harry is quiet for a long moment, his fingers still moving. At last, they go still. “Yes, you’re probably right.”

 

“I know I’m right,” Louis says, and for some reason, his voice is gentle, as though Harry is the one experiencing the rejection rather than vice-versa. “Listen, I’m going to sleep here, on the floor, I reckon. It’s as easy as anything ever is on my bad hip. But if you’d like, you can go and sleep in the bed.”

 

Harry feels suddenly off-kilter, in a way he can’t quite put his finger on. “No,” he says, after a moment. “No, I’ll stay.”

 

But he rolls onto his side and faces away from Louis. Louis does not try to touch him.

 


	14. Had It In the Air/Just Couldn't Land It

Whatever compromise that Harry had thought they had come to – and he still isn’t clear, looking back on it, which is doubtless at least partially to blame on the liquor – it does not seem to affect how they behave.

 

The next time Harry visits, he comes with gardening gloves and a spade and he spends the morning stumping around outside while Louis shores up the side of the porch and replaces rotting planks with fresh ones. They spend much of the first hour or so in silence, but eventually Louis brings up the book about tanks, and they are able to have a conversation that segues into something much more natural.

 

Harry comes around again the following Thursday, and it happens that after dinner, the weather is appalling, the wind rattling around the windows and the rain coming down in sheets that make it impossible to see a foot ahead of you.

 

Louis invites Harry to stay.

 

They have sex in the disguise afforded to them by the pounding of the rain on the roof, Louis less self-conscious about his body in the absolute dark, Harry a little more fevered and desperate in his touches and kisses. Harry feels as isolated as he ever has in this house, down at the end of a muddy laneway far out in the countryside, miles away from any lights save the ones they light themselves. It seems as though what happens here is not quite real, and he will not have to take it out into the real world with him tomorrow, when the weather clears; no one will ever find out.

 

They do not talk afterward, this time, but Louis turns into that awkward side-on pose that seems to be the only way he can find rest without putting any weight on his hip, and Harry finds that he can sort of curl into him, his back against Louis’ chest. They fall asleep that way – or at least Louis does, first, and Harry stays awake for a long time afterward, very conscious of the way he breathes.

 

At first, what they have done is an aberration in the quiet rhythm of Harry’s life, and he tries not to think about it. He cannot stay away, though, and after half a dozen or more times, it becomes something that Harry just does, like reading his books or cooking a meal. It fits into his day in a way that anything like it never has before. That is not to say that they make love every time he visits; sometimes they only talk, or work outside, and once when Louis is very sore and his face is very white, Harry sleeps over in Louis’ bed and just holds his hand. It is somewhat odd, but Harry feels no strong desire to effect any change on the arrangement. It is what it is.

 

Louis, for his part, seems content as well.

 

The problem for Harry is that he has always assumed that life progresses in a natural way. He and Louis had discussed this at the outset, he knows; Louis had always anticipated that Harry would find a wife and that their arrangement would cease. It is one thing to assume that eventuality, though, and another to find himself wondering how much longer this can go on. Louis does not question anything, but Harry cannot seem to help himself.

 

He blurts it out so suddenly one day while he is standing near the flowerbed that he had laid out previously under the west-facing window in the kitchen.

 

“There’s a girl I met.”

 

Louis, who is taking a break and sitting on the edge of the steps, tilts his head and squints a little in the sunlight.

 

“A girl,” he echoes. A long, slow moment passes, like molasses in the heat. “A pretty one, I hope.”

 

Harry cannot read Louis’ tone, and doesn’t try to. “She works in the village, at the florist’s. I’ve been calling at her parents’ for Sunday dinner, twice now.”

 

Louis nods. “Is that courting, nowadays? I’m out of practice, but it sounds like you’re doing it right.”

 

Harry may not recognize the tone in Louis’ voice, but he absolutely knows when he is having the mickey taken out of him. “Don’t be rude.”

 

Louis shrugs, glancing away. “I’m not. That’s nice for you.”

 

Harry had been expecting a reaction, of course – that was why he had brought it up. But this kind of non-emotiveness from Louis, a quiet sort of mocking, was not what he had anticipated or wanted.

 

“Is that it?” he demands, though he knows that this particular tone in his voice will evoke a reaction in Louis that he will not like. He cannot help it.

 

“Is what it?” This time, there is a trace of irritation in Louis’ voice. He reaches up and grips the handrail, using it to laboriously haul himself to his feet.

 

“You don’t have any reaction but that?” Harry asks.

 

“I don’t know what reaction you want me to have, Harry.” Louis’ face is a little bit twisted, but Harry can’t tell if it’s because the sunlight is so bright. “We discussed this. Didn’t we?”

 

Harry stares at him. “Yes, we talked about it. But that was before. Don’t you - ?”

 

“I meant what I said,” Louis tells him. “What’s changed? I told you that one day this was going to happen. And I told you that I was fine with it. I don’t want you trying to – start a fight that doesn’t need to be one.”

 

He turns and makes his way stiffly up the stairs. He is nearly across the porch and through the front door before Harry breaks free of his paralysis and hurries to catch up.

 

“I’m not trying to start a fight. I just want to talk about this honestly.”

 

Louis turns around, reluctantly. “I’m being honest with you. I think that you need to do what’s right for you.”

 

“And what about us?” Harry demands.

 

Louis loses his patience. “What _about_ us?”

 

“Don’t you care about me?” Harry asks. “I know you don’t say anything, that you never say anything, but I know that this isn’t nothing. We aren’t just doing – whatever it is we’re doing for no reason.”

 

“It doesn’t matter if there’s a reason,” Louis says, his voice sharp, gaze fixed on Harry’s.

 

“It matters to me,” Harry insists.

 

“Harry, for fuck’s sake.” Louis’ voice has not grown in volume, but the way it snaps out makes it feel that way anyway. “What, are you going to cook for me and wash up afterward while I read the paper or do the gardening? Are we going to listen to the bloody wireless while you crochet me a scarf?”

 

Harry blinks at him. “Yes. Maybe not the crochet. What’s so bad about that?”

 

Louis very nearly throws up his hands. “Nothing! But it’s not what people do.”

 

Harry frowns. “It _is_ what people do.”

 

Louis shakes his head. Despite his demeanour, he is still pulling back, and Harry knows him well enough by now to see it, even though Louis doubtless thinks he can’t. “Not people like us,” Louis says. “Think it _through_ , Harry.”

 

Harry is not sure where the sudden wave of fury that engulfs him comes from, but he is happy to let it hold sway over all the rest of his emotions. He is very nearly quaking. “Would anyone even ever know about us?” he asks. “We could be happy, you know. It wouldn’t be – like everyone else’s life, but it would be our life. And then, if we decided that we didn’t want it anymore, we could always go our separate ways. But right now – this is what I want. And you throwing it in my face makes me feel terrible.”

 

“This is what you want?” Louis very nearly sneers. “I thought you met a girl. I thought you were having tea with her parents on Sunday.”

 

“Because that was what I thought I needed!” Harry takes a step closer. He is so frustrated that his hands have balled up of their own accord, tense and tight at his sides. “I could feel that something needed to happen, that I needed to make a decision and move forward with my life. I thought that seeing someone would help me fill the hole that obviously existed before you. And then it didn’t… it didn’t work.”

 

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Louis says, with an oddly flat slant in his voice. “I like this, with you. I like _you._ But this is not how things are done.”

 

This time, when he turns around, it is very final. Harry does not move as Louis limps into the house, and Louis does not turn around when, after an interminable few seconds during which Harry has no idea what to do, he abruptly comes to a decision and storms off of the porch.

 

Harry’s car rumbles down the driveway and out of sight, and only once it is gone do Louis’ shoulders slump.


	15. You Are My Sweetest Downfall

It is a blustery day a lot later – probably too much time later – the next time Harry makes the drive down the winding country road that will take him to Louis’. He did not call ahead. He does not know if Louis will want to see him, but the phantom that lives under his heart and tugs sometimes has retreated now that he is closer than he has been to Louis in a long time, and this feels right.

 

The girl he met – he has had to let her go. She was lovely, and very sweet, and Harry could easily have married her except for that when he looks into her eyes, it does not feel honest. It feels like he has a secret from her, and it feels like she is a placeholder for someone else. She deserves better than that, so Harry lets her go.

 

He does not want an apology from Louis. That is not why he came, even though the way that they spoke to each other when they saw each other last has made him uneasy at night more than once, has robbed him of sleep. He thinks that he just needs to see him, and maybe something inside of him will unclench, and some kind of decision will be easier to reach. Maybe Louis will change his mind. The hope is faint, but it is there.

 

He has found it difficult, over the past few weeks, to come to any kind of real decision about the future of his life. He has always been comfortable with his job, sure that when the time came, he would know what steps to take next. But now it feels like the time has been and gone, and he has still not taken those steps, and the world is not waiting for him to decide what he wants. It has caused him a not-inconsiderable amount of anxiety, and Harry is not accustomed to anxiety.

 

Harry’s car is idling in front of the house before the feeling steels over him. Looking up through the windshield, he realizes that the house feels vacant in a way that it never has, before. Even when Louis was ignoring him, it had always been obvious to Harry when he was at home. Now, there are dead leaves and debris in an undisturbed pile in front of the door, and the windows have been shuttered.

 

He wonders suddenly what Louis’ reaction has been, to all of this. It seems that he has made some kind of choice that will drive his life forward, in a way that Harry has not been able to. It makes Harry’s heart climb into his throat.

 

Nevertheless, Harry gets out of the car and mounts the steps. He knows before he knocks that there will not be an answer, but he knocks anyway.

 

The sound of it echoes inside and fades away.

 

Stooping, he collects the spare key from under the mat and, carefully moving the debris away from the step with his boot, he unlocks the door.

 

The hall is dark and chilly, and it smells faintly musty. Harry wonders how long Louis has been gone. Taking his time, he passes through the second doorway off of the passage and into the kitchen, looking around.

 

There is a fine layer of dust on everything, but it is tidy. It is all very disconcertingly not-Louis.

 

The front room is the same, though in here much of the furniture has been covered with white sheets. Harry imagines Louis doing all of this alone, silent and steadfast in this once-grand, empty house. It tugs at him, a little, and he closes the door on the scene and turns to the study.

 

In here, the air is a little bit warmer. Harry is cheered when he sees the remains of a fire – though from some weeks before – and an empty whiskey tumbler next to a half-full bottle. This is more familiar; it feels like Louis was here, if not recently, then at least at some point.

 

Harry spies the envelope on the bureau almost immediately, because it is the one thing out of place. The front of it is blank, but on the back, in Louis’ surprisingly tidy handwriting, is a letter ‘H’.

 

Before he can second-guess himself, Harry slips his finger under the corner of the envelope and slits the paper, opening the letter and unfolding it.

 

He does not allow himself to start reading until he goes around the desk and pushes back the dusty curtains. The windows on the other side have been cleaned, meticulously; sunlight spills in now, uninhibited, and Harry sits down in Louis’ writing chair, perfectly worn in and comfortable, and begins to read.

 

_Dear Harry,_

_(My Harry. I hope. Still.)_

_I’m an idiot. Please don’t take this the wrong way. This is not permission for you to call me an idiot. But an idiot is what I’ve been, and I can see that. I saw it, actually, the last time I saw you, because I could tell right away that I hurt you and I don’t feel good about that. The way we left things wasn’t right. A lot of that was my fault. (You’d best hold onto this piece of paper as proof that I’ve ever admitted guilt for anything in my life.)_

_I don’t know if I can explain this. You always say I’m the writer (you always have so much faith in me) but it’s easier writing for a non-specific audience. When I was writing my story, I didn’t mean for anyone to ever read it. That wasn’t the point. But this is for you, and it’s hard. I want it to be right. I want you to keep reading._

 

_I thought you would change your mind. I thought that a few months would go by, and you would realize that you could have a proper life, own a house that isn’t shit and have a wife and a few kids. That’s what someone like you is cut out for. And that leaves me, of course, exactly where I was, because all of that is out of reach for me now. And I thought that I’d rather not let myself fall into the trap of being happy with something that could never last._

_Don’t mistake this for self-pity. I know I’m fortunate to have a house, to have been successful at something, to even have a friend or two. I know that I’m lucky to have recovered as much as I have, and to have been given the chance to grow, and change. A lot of that is thanks to you. I am very grateful._

_This isn’t self-pity, but it is recognizing my own limitations. I can’t ask a wife to tie herself to me. I would have wanted kids, once, but kids need someone stable. I drink too much, I hurt too much, and I am not always nice. You overlook these things in me, and maybe you shouldn’t, but I will take what I can get._

_I know I should have trusted you. I’m trying to stop blaming the war for how I am, but it really did make me. Or, it re-made me. I was someone else and I got used to that and now I’m having to get used to being me. It surprised me very much that you like this person I’ve become. I don’t even, most days. Again – not self-pity. I just know I’m difficult. I’ve never made it easy, least of all on you._

_I’m not gone forever. I know I said I might leave you this house when I die, but for now it’s still mine. I know that I don’t have to tell you to take care of it, because you’re probably already tidying._

_I’ve gone to France, because I’m long overdue a visit. I can’t say that I’m looking forward to it, exactly, because I’m not. I’m a bit frightened of it, if I’m honest. I know that it isn’t like it was, but in a way I think that’s worse. What if I don’t recognize it? What if it doesn’t recognize me?_

_I think I’ll have a chat with Zayn, clear my head a bit. Hopefully when I come back I’ll be less full of shit and you’ll forgive me._

_I expect you to have the kettle waiting. (The proper one, mind.)_

_Always in my heart._

_Louis._

 

Harry reads the letter in its entirety three times. Then, on a whim, he springs from the chair, strolls around the bureau, and sets about starting a fire in the grate. It is much too warm for this, but he removes his jacket and stokes the flames anyway. When at last they are just right, too bright to look at directly, Harry folds the letter back up the way Louis left it, tucks it inside of the envelope, and brings it to his lips.

 

When he tosses it into the fire, the flames curl around it at once, devouring it whole. It does not make him sad. On the contrary, he feels a burgeoning of hope under his heart, a fervent, iron-clad belief that the direction he has wanted for his life is about to become clearer. He will not know for sure until he sees Louis again, until they talk this through and come to an agreement. But what he does know is that that letter is not the last he will ever hear from Louis. The house will be here, and Harry will be here, until Louis can come home.

 

He pours himself a drink while he waits for the flames to die down, and true to Louis’ words, he finds himself brushing dust from surfaces with the sleeve of his shirt as he wanders through the house, taking stock. The strange, jubilant, twisting under his heart does not abate. He thinks that, all things considered (tidying-wise), he will start with the front room, and those disconcerting white sheets.

 

First things first, though; he will need to put the kettle on.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading. You can find me on Tumblr at almost-a-class-act.


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